Now here’s “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines,” in which another good Terminator (Arnold) and another bad Terminator (Kristanna Loken) have come back from the future to say “nope, you didn’t avert Judgement Day after all, you’ve only postponed it!” Cut to chases and fights, squealing tires, breaking glass. Reload weapons and repeat. Any discrepencies between the mythology developed in “T3” and the first two movies are not glaring enough to bother me. Changes in timelines and “future-history” can probably account for them. The lesson John Connor, and the audience, learns from the good Terminator is that mankind’s lot is not to cheat destiny, but to keep fighting and not give up, no matter what. But wait, isn’t that the lesson we learned, more or less, way back in 1984 when we saw the original “Terminator?” And isn’t saving three billion people, just to kill them all over again—isn’t that just mean?
I think that’s the overall shortcoming of “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines:” we’ve done all this before. We’ve seen grace and confrontation once each before, now we’re just getting confrontation all over again. There are some interesting, even poignant scenes near the movie’s end, but are they worth the entire movie?
What about “T3,” the movie itself? As is common with sequels, the movie attempts to have a “bigger, louder, faster” feel, but comes across more like “Terminator Jr.” or “Terminator Weakened.” All the individual elements are competent and decent, but weaker than their predecessors. As the villainess, Kristanna Loken is sinister, laconic, and glass-eyed, but would be a lot better if she came before “T2’s” Robert Patrick instead of after. As John Connor and another human Arnold is sent to protect, Nick Stahl (so good in “In the Bedroom”) and Claire Danes are too cleaned-up, too pretty, and too much like the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” version of their characters. Director Jonathan Mostow (“Breakdown”) keeps the chases and fights going pretty well, in a pedestrian CG kind of way, using a cemetary, a secret military facility, and the streets of Cleveland as the battleground. Only Arnold himself comes across without complaint; he is cold, mechanical, yet not above winking self-parody. “T3’s” screenwriters have given him the kind of deadpan one-liners that harken back to his glory days in the 1980s (“your levity is good.”)
Maybe what all this comes down to is the big question of sci-fi mythologies: how much of the unknown is enough? Do we want to see Yoda fight (I didn’t)? Do we want to know where the aliens in “Aliens” come from (I don’t)? Do we want to read the last chapter of the novel “2001” or is the movie enough (I don’t want to read it)? For me, there is wonder, and then there’s that death of wonder that comes with too much exposition. Some people could go on watching more and more “Terminator” movies forever. They could watch movies about the war between man and machine, they could watch movies about humanity rebuilding after the war, they could watch movies about world governments and space programs and all sorts of stuff in the post-machine war terrain. Would all that be interesting? Probably, kind of. But every story has to end somewhere.
Finished October 8, 2003
Copyright © 2003 Friday & Saturday Night
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