Terminator 3
Directed by: Jonathan Mostow
Written by: John Brancato, Michael Ferris and Tedi Sarafian
Starring: Jackie Chan as the Terminator, Chris Tucker as John Connor

Arnold Schwarzenegger (whose last name means “black plowman” in English) has been in a slump for quite some time now. His last three movies, End of Days, The Sixth Man, and Collateral Damage, were all box office flops. Arnold seems to have turned his attention from making killer action movies to politics and making sure retarded kids exercise. Maybe Arnie is getting soft in his old age, or maybe the popularity of the circulating Arnold prank phone calls has tainted his image so much that people can no longer take him seriously, even more than before. Whatever the answer is, a true sign of his need for a hit is the fact that he agreed to another Terminator sequel WITHOUT the involvement of James Cameron in any way. Well I guess you could say “There is no fate but what we make for ourselves”.

T3 is, in my eyes, the unofficial third installment in the Terminator series. Directed by Jonathan Mostow (director, U-571) and written by John Brancato (writer, The Game), Michael Ferris (writer, The Game) and Tedi Sarafian. There is a certain group of directors that seem to be Hollywood’s cash grab elite, possessing no real originality or style. A good example of this would be the choice of Brett Ratner as director of Red Dragon. With only two movies under his belt, Rush Hour 2 and Double Take, both fish out of water action comedies, Ratner was placed alongside such greats as Ridley Scott, Jonathon Demme, and Michael Mann. Guys like this are brought in to pump out sequels and summer blockbusters with little experience (which I assume makes them an easy target for major studio manipulation). They just do what they must to create an accessible action blockbuster, and are fine with not creatively furthering the film past what the genre or audience calls for. This makes for pretty uninteresting stuff.

T3 basically follows the same plot as T2, only ten years down the road. Sarah Conner is dead, and John Connor is living as a drifter attempting to keep his identity a secret in order to avoid any further complications with robots from the future. Judgement Day passed the world by without incident, leaving John and his dying mother to think that they stopped the war of the machines, but “dey were wrong”. A new killing machine, the T-X, appears via time travel and has only one mission…..to kill John Connor of course. Not unlike the T-1000 in T2, The T-X is made of liquid metal, but in this case can take the form of complex machinery with small moving parts. And yes, the T-X takes the form of a woman! Yes, quite a turn of events.

Of course Arnold shows up like he has in both previous movies, completely naked and buff as shit. A similar scene as in T2 occurs when Arnold enters a bar to get some clothes. But this time, the bar turns out to be a men’s strip club full of biker women. Hilarity ensues as Arnold is mistaken for a stripper, and to top it all off, Macho Man is playing as this all goes down.

From then on, John Connor happens to meet up with grade school friend Kate Brewster (Claire Daines), who is apparently also on the T-X’s hit list as a future soldier and John Connor’s wife. From then on, the story is basically the T-X hunting the two as Arnold does anything to stop her. This leads to a fairly impressive chase sequences between a truck, a giant construction crane/truck, and a fire engine. It’s also revealed that the T-X has the ability to manipulate other machines, apparently with her mind? A fleet of unmanned police cars chase after John and Kate, all under the control of the T-X. If she has this power, why not simply control the vehicle which John and Kate are riding in? Although an earlier scene shows the T-X tinkering with the dashboard of a police car, it’s still unclear whether or not she previously rigged these vehicles to be under her control. Does it really matter in the end? No.

Basically, T3 is making a pretty ballsy claim. It’s saying that it deserves to be a part a story line which started with two solid films. This is where it fails miserably. On it’s own it’s an entertaining movie. But when placed along side the two films before it, it takes on a responsibility to maintain the story and quality that James Cameron provided before it. Any sort of ground Cameron made visually has been thrown out the window. The movie looks like every other action film. The cool blue and grey look of T2 is exchanged for a film that is lit as well as it has to be, no better. The effects are completely overdone. The T-X ends up looking less impressive and less realistic then the T-1000 that was created ten years ago. Arnold himself seems to be a tool for the writer’s to exploit his accent and tough guy image, getting cheap laughs by putting dumb words into the mouth of a foreign body builder (which I admit is entertaining, but would have been more appropriate in a different Arnold movie). Even the music in this movie was horrible. What was a cool, futuristic soundtrack, with pounding percussion and robotic rythms, has been replaced by a standard action movie orchestra. The Terminator theme wasn’t even heard until the end credits of the movie! As soon as I saw Arnold stand up naked in his time bubble, I expected the clanky terminator theme to kick in, but instead I got some ordinary string arrangement that just sucked my balls into oblivion like only the most powerful of black holes.

Overall, the franchise has taken a step down. The humour that was hinted at and used appropriately in T2 has now been bumped up to the next level, turning the Terminator into a fish out of water action/comedy. Any cool science fiction elements have been traded in for Arnold’s one liner’s, and any tricks that the mind of someone like James Cameron could have come up with have been replaced by the all to obvious idea of making the enemy a woman. T3 comes across as a well done fan film, and just doesn’t deserve to be a part of the Terminator film world. However, maybe if they re-cast and marketed the film for a new audience, it could’ve been great. — Jay C