As a big fan of the first two Terminator movies, I got pretty excited when I heard the plans for a third. But I gave up hope that it would be any good when I learned that James Cameron, the visionary writer-director of The Terminator (1984) and T2: Judgment Day (1991), as well as Titanic (1997), was not going to participate in making the new film.
That will teach me to not give up hope so quickly. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, while not as startlingly original as the first two films, is a pretty damn good movie anyway. But be warned: this movie will make zero sense to anyone unfamiliar with the first two films. For example, almost all of the humor in the movie (and there are some absolutely brilliant jokes) depends on a fairly sure memory of the earlier pictures.
T3 picks up 12 years after young John Connor, his mother Sarah, and Arnold, as the good Terminator, averted nuclear holocaust. Now John is a grown man played by Nick Stahl (In the Bedroom) and he lives "off the grid" (no driver's license, address, social security card), where he believes machines can't track him. But of course those machines from the future are pretty darn resourceful. They send another Terminator back through time to again try to assassinate John so that he will never become the leader of the human resistance in the machine's war against humanity. Arnold Schwarzenegger returns as the good terminator (isn't that kind of an oxymoron?) who again travels back through time to protect John and a new character, Kate (Claire Danes from the TV show "My So Called Life") who gets swept up in the action against her will.
The movie's clever conceit is that the bad terminator this time is actually a "terminatrix," a stunning woman played by the former model Kristanna Loken. She is the most lethal terminator yet and it is fun to watch her beat the hell out of Schwarzenegger. The Terminator pictures helped usher in this current era of female empowerment in the movies with the strong character Sarah Connor, fiercely played in the first two movies by Linda Hamilton. In the new movie Danes and especially Loken grab the ass-kicking reigns from Hamilton. The days when the man led the woman by the hand as they ran from danger are finally, thankfully, over.
The days are also long gone when a movie like this could be made with grit and resourcefulness on a small budget. T3 is big, sleek, expensive, and very loud. The original Terminator had Arnold shooting up a police station with a machine gun; in this one the Terminatrix levels a couple of city blocks with a giant crane and we are shown every bit of the devastation. But even though the movie overflows with special effects and set pieces, it doesn't rely on them. A strong story drove the first two pictures and a strong story drives Rise of the Machines as well. The lean narrative of the movie shames the bloated mess of The Matrix Reloaded, the summer's other big sci-fi doomsday extravaganza. It proves again that a story with characters we care about is the central element in any movie's success.
Jonathan Mostow, who made the terrifying little Kurt Russell thriller Breakdown a couple of years ago, directs T3 and he brings to it his gift for creating suspense. There are some genuinely frightening moments and images in this film. The director also includes quite a few unexpectedly beautiful shots. If Mostow is not a natural visionary like Cameron, then at least he shows sensitivity for beauty and understands that Cameron photographed the earlier films with a poet's eye.
But I'm giving the movie three and a half stars instead of four because it can't function autonomously and because it doesn't quite organically blend those poetic moments with its bone-jarring action. The filmmakers are very self-conscious of their box office responsibilities and, deferring to the film's action audience, they don't linger on anything too serious or too lyrical for long.
So Rise of the Machines is not the dark masterpiece of The Terminator, or even the emotionally wrenching saga of T2, but it is still a very affecting movie. Like its forerunners, T3 is worried about how indispensable machines have become in our lives and it is an urgent warning for us to stay aware of how plugged in we are to technology. Also like them, it's a hell of a lot of fun.
Reach the reporter at michael.b.green@asu.edu.
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out of four stars
