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Terminator 3 - Rise of the Machines (Widescreen Edition) Customer Reviews (16 - 18 of 105 Reviews)

"Desire is irrelevant. I am...a MACHINE!"
Leave it to a different director, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and a story now covering the span of three decades (1984, 1991, and 2003) to finish off the Terminator Trilogy. I was skeptical when I heard that mastermind behind these brutal android assassins from the future would not be on this project. Instead we have Jonathan Mostow, who, all things considered, did his best to keep the integrity, power, and traditional key elements from the first two movies wound tightly enough together for a final hurrah.

What is familiar here that still holds true to the first two films? Lots of chase scenes. Unique Terminator special effects, fight scenes of massive proportion and drama (hey, ever seen two Terminators go at it?) and a diverse cast of characters in present day California who are trying to change the consequences of each others actions to alter the future. Oh, and did I mention the juggernaut of all Terminator lore, Arnold Schwarzenegger? He comes back in via a hot sphere of lightning and thunder to walk the earth one last time.

I figured we'd see Linda Hamilton again, but it wasn't meant to be. Edward Furlong I thought, now in his 20's, would be a shoe-in for the older version of the John Connor we met back in Terminator 2: Judgment day. No go, we get Nick Stahl instead, which isn't a bad thing.

We get the usual changeup in plot. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines is a title that already tells us things are going to get hairy. Before I go on, let me give you a brief synopsis of the Terminator mythos: If you haven't already seen Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, then I suggest you go back and watch those before jumping into this, otherwise your really not going to "get" all of the story, nor appreciate what has come before it. The terminators are android assassins who are sent from the future back to the past to kill someone in order to alter the future for their benefit or gain. In this final movie of the Terminator trilogy, it's a bit of a switch, because this time it's a beautiful female! Played by Kristanna Lokken, the T-X model of Terminator is back and its mission starts out with a bang as it starts killing high school kids throughout the town. Why is she doing that? What could these kids possibly do in the future that would affect it and its Skynet ruling annihilators?

The T-X quickly meets up with Kate, who works at a veterinary clinic. Kate loves her dad though he's always away with his job with some new project called "Skynet". Being a military daughter is something to get used to, but she handles it well, and is soon going to be married! Life couldn't get any better right? Well next thing you know Kate finds that a young man she knew in Junior High School stealing meds from the clinic. She locks him up but before she can take any further action, the T-X is upon the clinic. The chase begins as the T-101 (Schwarzenegger) comes in to save the girl and stop the T-X from killing her. We soon find out why the T-X is killing the various teens in town, why Kate has a destiny with John Connor, what the link is between the Skynet of today and the machines of the future.

ACTION: This thing has more action than any movie I've seen for a while. They've kept good to original Terminator movies of yester year as we always have various vehicles and obstacles, as well as munitions, involved. The T-X makes Robert Patrick's morphing Terminator T-1000 from the 1991 movie look like Forrest Gump. This one has all the strength, running power, and agility, but can also alter anything electronically with the flick of a forefinger. Soon we have a plethora of unmanned police cars leave the vet clinic and chase down the T-101 and its occupants Kate and John. Kate is mad as hell, and she lets the Terminator know it! Why is she being kidnapped? And who was the woman gunning down everyone in sight with a semi-automatic handgun? A huge Crane truck is used in a sequence of chase scenes that before the sun rises, appears to shred about half of the city.

ACTING: Lokken is superb as a terminator. Her unwavering, direct styles of talk as well as her sleek yet still kind of robotic mannerisms add a great flavor to the fold in showing just what she is. She is not a woman. She is a machine, and she has one purpose: To terminate whoever is on her itinerary! Schwarzenegger is getting old but he's not looking like most guys his age. His size, strength and overall demeanor, not to mention his attachment to the pop cult status that people imagine when they hear the word "Terminator" is not only necessary but extremely well done. They do lighten this up at times with several great one liners that make us laugh as we again see the Terminator absorb slang and body language and combine it for it's own interpretive use. Claire Daines does a great job playing Kate, her girl next door grin as well as her ability to show the despair and short temper that is her characters persona, is excellent. Earl Boen is also seen in here and it cracks us up during a certain scene of carnage. You may remember Earl as Dr. Peter Silberman, who treated Sarah Connors schizoid visions of a future run by Terminators in both T1 and T2. It was great to see him in there.

Setting and landscape/Terminator Mythos: We're all over the city as usual, as Kate's boyfriend soon gets a visit from the T-X. Meanwhile, the gang head out through the desert to another town where they find the mausoleum where Sarah Connor was laid to rest. We discover what fate she succumbs to and also find out that she left a little gift behind. By now law enforcement is all too aware of the crisis on their hands and has descended upon the cemetery. This sets up for some excellent shootout scenes and an epic showing of the Terminator, coffin hoisted on shoulder, firing back at law enforcement. This again sets up another chase scene, this time going away from trucks and taking flight in a hearse.

The story later sets us up for the final showdown, which involves Kate's dad, the machines rising up on their day of infamy, and some more great fight scenes between the advanced T-X and the old school T-101. Towards a climatic ending of a fight, John Connor thanks the T-101, in which of course, Schwarzenegger replies "we'll meet again". This is cryptic as in the movie the T-101 tells John just how he dies in the future...

The comedic one liners are used much more here than in one or two, in fact in the first one they weren't meant to be funny, it was like Clint Eastwoods Dirty Harry line "go ahead punk, make my day" that they just ingrained themselves into our social landscape to the point we beat them like a dead horse. In T3's case, I think it was an attempt at letting us in to hang with Schwarzenegger during lighter moments, and ultimately say goodbye: Not long after this movie Schwarzenegger went into politics, and rest is history. However, the history isn't told just yet, that all depends on the success or failure of the Terminators themselves!

The strong suspense and action scenes make up for what is lost. What is lost is the mythos itself. After not killing off Sarah Connor in 83 and her son later on in 1991, The terminator returns yet again, only this time to kill off future leaders of John Connors Resistance Council. I thought that was stretching it a bit thin. The other head scratcher is the crescendo of the legend of "Skynet", which now is easy of course to say, that it was all "software", when all throughout the first two movies it was made to believe that the hardware was more of the man-made culprit of the apocalypse. I know I know, without software you can't operate hardware past much of a basic hydraulic robot type stage. However when you think about it, it's almost too easy in the end to try and act like "that's the way it was all along". I'm just being picky, let's face it: Hardware or Software, it doesn't matter. What matters is if we are intrigued by the storyline and plot concerning the Terminators of the future and the people of the present, and the Earth that may or may not be tomorrow. Considering it's minus James Cameron, all in all Terminator 3 was not a bad way to go out for one of the greater Sci-Fi trilogies of our day, even though it took them 19 years to do it!



Not so great as the first 2
Terminator is really slowing down. If Arnold was not in this movie it would have been a bomb. This movie gets kinda boring after a while. I would think twice about getting this

Burn it! BUURRNN IT!
As a fan of the Terminator series, words cannot describe how disappointing this movie is. At its worst, its a pathetic parody of the previous Terminators which ignores almost every aspect of what made T1 & T2 so enthralling. They might as well make a sequel to Aliens in which the bio-mechanical horrors are transformed into cute little munchkins who spread rainbows and sunshine all over the world.
At it's best, its a chance to see Kristanna Loken in tight-fitting clothes. In fact, Lokens beauty seems to be the only redeeming aspect of T3, and I'm guessing they cast her as the nemesis to try and overlay the fact that the rest of the movie is a terrible travesty of mammoth proportions. Yes, she is very attractive, but you can stick a rare and beautiful flower on a steaming pile of crap and call it exquisite french nouveau cuisine, but nothing will take away from the fact that that it's still a steaming pile of crap with a pretty looking flower on top.

I could write pages upon pages of text on the topic of why every copy of this movie should be destroyed immediately, but I'll sum up the salient points instead :

1) The dialog is atrocious, e.g : "John Conner" appearing to be turned on by the fact that Brewster reminds him of his mother. Brewster telling off Conner "What are you, some kind of GANG MEMBER? How do you live with yourself?!" There's far more, but I'm afraid I've blocked most of it out. It's too terrible to attempt to comprehend it all at once.

2) The attempts at humor that were not in the least bit funny.
Some of the one-liners from the previous Terminators are recycled in T3, but this time around they fail to retain the cool and wry humor of the originals. What I found most disturbing was the "Talk to the hand" scene at the gas station with the stupid Funky Man song afterwards. What were they thinking?!

And the rest : The action-over-substance quality that dominates the entire movie. The fact that many aspects of the Terminator movies that preceded this one were ignored. The fact that a coherent plot is almost non existent. The fact that there is absolutely no originality to the movie. The fact that they actually spent $160 million on this trash.

I simply cannot proceed with writing anything else about this movie. I'm at a loss for words. If you will excuse me, I must now depart on a journey to bury my copy of T3 at a crossroad in the desert at midnight in the hopes that, by some miracle, Hollywood will Terminate-with-extreme-prejudice the scheduled 2008 release of Terminator 4.
My advice to you would be to ignore this trash and look back with fond memories on the previous Terminator movies, click your heels, and say 3 times "There was no Terminator 3!"

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