Arnold Schwarzenegger is Back in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
Written: Jul 18 '03 (Updated May 21 '09)
Product Rating:
Pros: Continuation of the Terminator story. Lots of action.
Cons: Few inconsistencies. Not as good as Terminator 2: Judgment Day. No Sarah.
The Bottom Line: Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines is an action-packed movie that continues the Terminator story. It was entertaining, but I don't think it was as good as the second movie.
dragonfire88's Full Review: Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
One of the first movies I saw after my family got a VCR was Terminator. My stepfather at the time rented it. I had no idea what it would be like, and I do think that I was a bit too young to have seen it when I did. In 1991, Terminator 2: Judgment Day was released. I won tickets to an advance screening from a local radio station. I really liked the movie. When I heard that a third Terminator movie was going to be made, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to see it since James Cameron, the man behind the first two, was not going to be involved. Linda Hamilton was not going to return as Sarah Connor. Arnold was going to be in the movie, but I still wasn’t sure. Then earlier this year, I started to see previews of the movie and it looked like it would be good. So I decided to see it. The movie was good, but I think Terminator 2: Judgment Day was a lot better.
**I will be mentioning things about the first two Terminator movies that could be spoilers for people who haven’t seen those movies yet. If you haven’t seen those movies yet, read at your own risk.**
Ten years have passed since John Connor and his mother Sarah tried to prevent Judgement Day from happening. It was several years before they saw that Judgement Day didn’t happen. Even though they managed to change the future, John still felt like he wasn’t safe. He lived always on the move. He had no address, phone number, or anyway that he could be tracked by computer. Late one night he wrecked his motorcycle and hurt his leg. He then broke into a veterinary hospital for supplies to take care of his leg.
Kate Brewster was setting up her wedding registry when she received a call from her father Robert. He had to cancel plans with her because he had a problem to take care of at work. He was in the military. A computer virus was running rampant through all public systems, but military and government systems were not infected. Some people were wanting to activate Skynet, a computer defense system, to take over all computer systems to find the virus and eliminate it. It would only take a few minutes for the virus to be found. Robert didn’t want to do that. He didn’t like the idea of Skynet being in charge of everything.
A beautiful woman appeared naked in Beverly Hills. She was a Terminator, the T-X. She had been sent back not only to kill John Conner, but also several other people who would work with John in the resistance. In a deserted area, another Terminator arrived from the future. He was sent back by the resistance.
Kate worked for the veterinary clinic that John broke into and she caught him. It turned out that the two went too junior high together before John disappeared. The T-X turned up, followed shortly by the other Terminator. John, Kate, and the second Terminator got away, though Kate thought that she was being kidnaped. It turned out that the second Terminator had been sent back to keep John and Kate safe. Kate would also be very important to the resistance. She didn’t believe what was going on at first. The Terminator told John that Judgement Day had just been postponed. Skynet was close to becoming self aware and attacking humans. John and Kate decided to try to stop Skynet from being activated to avoid Judgement Day.
CAST
Arnold Schwarzenegger - Terminator Nick Stahl - John Connor Claire Danes - Kate Brewster Kristanna Loken - T-X (Terminatrix) David Andrews - Robert Brewster
Jonathan Mostow - Director
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was released on July 2, 2003. The movie was 109 minutes long and rated R. This is not a movie that children of any age should see. There was some swearing in the movie, but not too much. The word that rhymes with luck was used a few times.
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was an action movie. It was jammed full of action scenes, including a lot of explosions. There were some car chases and a lot of shooting. The movie moved at a fast pace and I was never bored with it. There was a lot going on with the chases and fights, but the plot of the movie wasn’t that complicated.
There was a lot of violence in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. The T-X started to hunt down her targets as soon as she arrived. She shot one person at a drive through. That was shown from a distance. She did a lot of shooting and she killed several people. Most of that was shown off camera, but some of the killings were shown on camera, and they were rather bloody and nasty looking. This movie was very violent. It is more than likely too violent for some people. It is entirely too violent for children of any age to see. Near the beginning of the movie, the T-X showed that she could analyze blood for DNA identification. The way she did that was rather disgusting.
There was some brief nudity at the beginning of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Like the first two movies, the people (or Terminators) who travel through time are naked when they arrive from the future. It was mainly just bare backsides or the T-X and Arnold shown. There was a small glimpse of the front of the T-X, but you can’t really see anything because of her hair. It has been a while since I’ve seen Terminator or all of Terminator 2: Judgment Day. I did see a little of it recently on television, but I missed a lot of it. The time travel arrival did look like it did in the first two movies - at least from what I remember - but I don’t remember there being fire involved with that. The scenes when the Terminators arrived contained all the nudity for the movie. That did show that Arnold was in still in amazing shape.
There was some humor in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Most of it seemed to be provided by things Arnold said or did. He had a few funny lines in the second movie that worked well. In this movie, it seemed like there were too many of them, and that they were more forced. Arnold was turned into comic relief.
Sarah Connor was a very important character in Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. She changed a great deal between the two movies. She did a voice over narration in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. I think she also did one at the end of the first Terminator, but I can’t remember now. John did the narration in this movie. She was not in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Her absence was explained about half way through the movie. I didn’t like it that she wasn’t in the movie. It just wasn’t the same without her in it. I didn’t really like it that a different actor played John this time either. I think it would have made this movie more connected with the previous movie if Edward Furlong had returned. Nick Stahl was ok in the role. I just think it would have been better with the same actor. It seemed like John wasn’t the same character as the John from Terminator 2: Judgment Day at times. Yes several years had passed, and John did some more growing up and was now an adult instead of a teenager, but something about him still didn’t seem right to me.
There were a lot of special effects in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, but there weren’t any ground breaking effects like there were in the second movie. The effects for the new Terminator in that movie were absolutely amazing when the movie came out. In this movie, there were good effects, but nothing that was as new as what was used in that movie with the liquid metal Terminator. There weren’t any effects that amazed me like there were in the last movie. There were a few times in the movie when the camera was very jerky.
The plot of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines seemed to be very much like the plot of Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The second movie managed to be different from the original in several ways, including having two Terminators sent through time. That wasn’t the case this time. Two Terminators were sent through time again. The T-X did have other targets to take out this time, but her primary target was still John. There was a car chase near the beginning of the movie that reminded me a lot of one in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The T-1000 was chasing John in a semi. Several things ended up being destroyed during the chase. I think I remember the Terminator (Arnold - I’m going to refer to him by that name from now on to make things clearer) showing up on a motorcycle to help John. In this movie, the T-X was chasing John in some large truck with a crane. Many other vehicles and even some buildings were destroyed. Arnold arrived on a motorcycle to help John. Later in the movie, the T-X started to chase after John, Kate, and Arnold. She was running and she attacked the vehicle. That was very much like a scene in the second movie when the T-1000 was running after Sarah, John, and Arnold, who were in a car. The prevention of Judgement Day was again a central part of the plot. It almost seemed like the script of the second movie was just tweaked a bit here and there to make it a bit different. There was something from near the end of this movie that reminded me of something from the end of the first movie.
There were some things about Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines that bothered me. There were some things that didn’t seem to be consistent with what had happened in the previous movies. First of all, at one point, Arnold has a line saying he was a T-101 model of Terminator. That was not his model number in the prior movies. I think the model number had been T-800, but I can’t remember for sure.
During one scene in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Arnold was shooting at the police so that he and John could get away. After firing off a ton of bullets, he did this scan that showed that there were no human casualties. It was not explained why he did that and why he wasn’t killing humans. In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, he was stopped from killing people when John gave him a direct order to not kill anyone. After that, he didn’t kill anyone. There was no order like that given in this movie, but he was doing the same thing of not killing humans. John told Arnold that he couldn’t kill people, but that hadn’t been the case before John gave him the order not to kill anyone in the second movie. He was not the same Terminator that was sent back to protect John in the last movie. He even pointed that out to John at one point in this movie. He didn’t know a lot of things that had gone on between John and the last Terminator, so it didn’t make sense to me that Arnold was operating under an order John gave a different Terminator ten years before. I know that isn’t a big thing, but it bothered me. Maybe John did some more modification to the program for the T-800 (or T-101, whatever he was) in the future and made it part of the program that any of those models the resistance used wouldn’t kill people. Once I started to think about the movie after it was over, that just started to bug me a bit.
The T-X was the new Terminator in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. She really wasn’t that different from the T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. She was made out of the liquid metal like he was, though she also had a robotic skeleton like the original Terminator. I’m not sure how she was able to do some things, like change shape, with her skeleton. Her one arm did change into some different weapons. That was different. She could also control other machines. Otherwise, she really didn’t seem that new and different. In the second movie, the T-1000 was very different from the original Terminator, and much scarier because of his other abilities. The T-X didn’t seem any scarier than the T-1000 to me. I don’t know how the Terminator could have been changed any more to make her more different. It did seem that she was acting a lot like the T-1000 acted in the second movie. She even seemed to be trying to imitate the same facial expressions. She tilted her head in a way that I’m sure I remember the T-1000 doing. There were a few scenes where she seemed to be doing almost the same thing that the T-1000 had done before.
In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, a man - I can’t remember his name now - was named for being responsible for designing robotics that would end up being the machines that took over under Skynet’s control. I think it was also said that he was behind the creation of - I really need to watch the second movie all the way through again. He worked for a company that was doing a lot of research into artificial intelligence. John, Sarah, and Arnold talked to the man about his role in creating Skynet and the machines. He agreed that it had to be stopped and he destroyed his records of his work, and went with the others to destroy other records and evidence at the company. There was a huge explosion that took out most of the building. The records of the work were destroyed, which is why Judgement Day was avoided before. In Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Robert Brewster was working with Skynet. There were also robots being built and tested. They were the original machines that Kyle told Sarah about in the first movie. My problem with this is it wasn’t explained how they, or Skynet, was built, after John and Sarah destroyed the records and the company in the second movie. At one point, John did mention about destroying the company, but he never questioned how Robert was now involved with Skynet or how the machines were built after all the evidence and records were destroyed in the second movie. I don’t remember Robert ever being mentioned in the second movie.
John and the Terminator sent back to protect him were returning characters in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, though the Terminator was a bit different. John did seem to do some more growing in the movie. There didn’t seem to be the bond between him and the Terminator like there was in the second movie. Kate was a new character, and a main character in the movie. At one point, John said that she reminded him of his mother. She was like Sarah from the first movie. Kate was living her life when it was turned upside down by the appearance of a Terminator from the future that was sent to kill her. She had to accept some very strange things in a short amount of time. There really wasn’t much character development in the movie.
The acting wasn’t outstanding in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, but it wasn’t horrible either. Arnold did fine with his role, but I think he was better in the second movie. Nick Stahl was also fine. There wasn’t anything that really stood out about his performance. Claire Danes was good as Kate. She was very believable in her role. Kristanna Loken didn’t have much to do other than look emotionless and fight. She had the emotionless look down good, though at times, that reminded me a lot of Robert Patrick in the second movie.
CHARACTERS
John Connor - He was now in his twenties. He lived on the move so he couldn’t be found. He still felt like he wasn’t safe. He was sick of hearing about his destiny. He didn’t want to become the leader he was told he would.
Kate Brewster - Young woman who had her life altered when a Terminator arrived to kill her. She didn’t want to believe what was going on. She was strong at times.
Terminator - An obsolete model of Terminator that was captured by the resistance and reprogrammed. His mission was to protect John and Kate.
T-X - Newest model of Terminator. She was sent back in time to kill John along with several people who would work with him in the resistance, including Kate.
I did enjoy Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, but I was disappointed by it. It was missing something. I haven’t figured out what exactly, but something was missing for me. Maybe it was the fact that James Cameron wasn’t involved with the movie this time. It was entertaining, and it filled in more in the story of John Connor. Fans of the first movies will probably like the movie since it is the next chapter in the story. I do think that things would make more sense if the first two movies were seen first, though someone could see this one alone. There were things that bothered me about the movie though. I did like Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl better.
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