because you can't have too much entertainment...
July 2003

Diminishing Returns
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
Directed by Jonathan Mostow
Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Claire Danes, Nick Stahl, and Kristanna Loken.

 

When we last left the inspired James Cameron helmed Terminator series, a dozen years back, the nuclear apocalypse had been avoided and the future was open to all sorts of ambiguous possibility. One of those possibilities being -- shocking isn't it? -- a sequel. No. You can't hope to open up the philosophical Pandora's Box of time-travel and ever hope to achieve closure. If endless possible futures weren't enough to justify a sequel the massive hit status of Terminator 2 surely was. So, given that a sequel was never out of the question, based on the premise of the first films, I couldn't reject this continuation outright, despite my affection for the Cameron films it succeeds. So, despite my reservations, I returned for updates in the ongoing saga of a rusty prototype Terminator and the sorry tale of John Connor. I was hoping for the best.

Sadly, the best that can be said about Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines is that as action blockbusters go, it's more than serviceable. Stuff blows up real good. Unfortunately it blows up real good early on. The first major sequence is a chase scene with huge trucks, police cars, and veterinary hospital ambulances and it's a doozy. Extremely well staged, even inventive, the mass destruction that follows manages to temporarily relieve any doubts about the new man at the reigns. Yet once Jonathan Mostow proves his mettle as an action director, he doesn't seem to have much left to give. James Cameron's original films simply had more depth. There was more for the audience than simple vicariously violent thrills.

Rise of the Machines is exciting to watch but it's far too pale a copy of Judgment Day to really grip the imagination. The story and screenplay (by John Brancato, Michael Ferris and Tedi Sarafian) take no major chances with the plot, throwing only one real curveball in the entire two hours. In fact, apart from the prison break of Sarah Connor in the second film (she is long since dead as the story resumes), the story appears to be a virtually identical in structure. You have your old Terminator, the reliable Schwarzenegger sent back from the future to protect John Connor. And you have your new terminator, more advanced and more deadly, sent back to kill him. This time the major cyborg threat, a TX, is played by Kristanna Loken. Unfortunately, and to the film's detriment, she's far more emotional than the previous franchise villains. For unknown reasons she seems capable of expressing emotional responses all over the place: annoyance, frustration, confusion, and cat-that-got-the-bird satisfaction. By contrast, the emotional repertoire of Robert Patrick in Judgment Day was far more restrictive and consequently more unnerving.

Finally, to wrap up the losing battle of this sequel, the audience-identifying protagonists are far less interesting. In place of a bratty son and his nearly-insane mother on the hunt/run, you have an all grown-up whiny son and his soon to be wife and eventual mother of his important resistance-fighting children on the same journey. While Claire Danes is a terrific actor, there's not much more that can be done with this semi-blank role than that which she does. That is to say that she invests it with enough humanity that you forget that you're watching a silly movie about robots from the future.

As the running time wears on, you may also notice that the beating heart of the franchise is entirely missing. Nothing in this film comes close to the grit and gravitas of the unhinged super-buff Linda Hamilton in the second installment. Her absence only brings into sharp focus the masterful storytelling and surprising emotional complexity of the first two films. James Cameron has long been heralded as one of the finest of all action directors. But what is less remarked upon is his gift at telling female driven stories within typically masculine genres. No matter how large Arnold Schwarzenegger's paychecks were and continue to be, the first two sci-fi classics were really, when all was said and done, the story of Sarah Connor. Without Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger and the franchise seem ever more machinelike. Her loss is felt in every frame of this new and inferior installment. C-

-Nathaniel

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