Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
(2003)
(SPOILERS) A Terminator
3 was as inevitable as Arnold’s waning career. He was never going to stick
to his pledge not to do a third without James Cameron (who had already made one
too many, even if the second cemented his bankability and gave him a lavish box
of effects tricks to play with). The
‘90s saw a steady downward career trend, not reversed by a second of the
decade’s collaborations with Cameron and being sent to da coola in the debacle
that was Batman and Robin. By the
time Rise of the Machines arrived, Arnie
was barely scraping by on the strength of international receipts. He needed its
success; it at least allowed him to go off governating with a modicum of
credibility. Which is about the amount of credibility Rise of the Machines possesses.
If T2 isn’t all
its reputation cracks it up to be, it’s a masterpiece next to its 12-years-later
very belated sequel. Which is a shame, as T3
has a few good ideas going for it, ones that are significantly more daring than
what was, for Cameron, becoming a laboured family action movie ethic (the cosy T2 unit coming after the cosy Aliens one) and a willingness to pull
his punches and opt for a saveable future and a good guy cyborg. T3
is credited to John Brancato, Michael Ferris and Tedi Sarafian. Assembled
credits include Tank Girl, The Game, The Net, Surrogates and
(!) Catwoman, as well as Terminator Salvation.
Not the most auspicious of résumés, then. However, the last of
those pictures is important as, whether or not you care for Ts 3
and 4 very much, it ‘s certainly
the case that they are tentatively willing to grapple with the ramifications of
all this meddling with timelines, and what must be going on with Skynet.
Indeed, while the execution of T3 is
frequently barely more than passable, some of the actual plot elements are
rather good.
Sending a Terminator back with a mission to take out John
Connor’s lieutenants if it can’t achieve the main target is pretty damn
sensible, and shows the writers have at least tried to think about the nuts and
bolts of this future scenario, aside from a shot of an old John giving orders
in a broken landscape. Likewise, even if its stodgily delivered, pairing up John
with someone involved in the US military, and therefore giving him connections
with which to broker a resistance, combats the rather miraculous notion of him
just rising from the ashes.
It’s also an interesting development, if one borne from the
necessity of the 1997 judgement date passing by, to have the T2 timetable shifted; Cyberdyne are no
longer the initiators of Judgement Day. And yet, it turns out to be inevitable.
The scenes at the Air Force base provide a needed balance to the hows and whys,
and the trap of the computer virus that causes the military to activate Skynet
is quite nifty, even if the realisation doesn’t have the same power (existing
on the Internet is a rather anticlimactic sign of desperation in the science
fiction genre).
The fatalistic aspect (although how the Terminator knows
this – “You only postponed it. Judgment
Day is inevitable” – is questionable, unless it has crunched some algorithms
and come up with a probability) of the picture sees it veering towards another
great franchise downer, and least on paper: Alien
3. Sarah Connor has died of leukaemia off screen, while John has become a
waster/drifter. The Terminator that comes back to save him killed him in the
future. Then whole thing ends with the nukes going off. It’s a blast!
And yet the entire exercise is all but still born. One is
tempted to place this entirely at Jonathan Mostow’s feet (he brought in pals
Ferris and Brancato to revise Sarafian’s script; he later directed their so-so Surrogates). Six years earlier Mostow delivered
a first rate little B-thriller called Breakdown.
Then he moved up a notch budget-wise to U-571.
It was still in the thriller genre (a fairly middling one that attracted
attention mainly for playing fast and loose with history), so the action was
germane to what he knew. There was nothing that really announced him as the
perfect guy to fill Cameron’s shoes. Perhaps he came cheap, even if the movie
itself didn’t (Carolco’s Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna bought the rights for
C2, which has since dissolved and been reborn as… Carolco?!) We’ve seen this
sort of thing elsewhere, with unsuitable directors thrown at something just to
get it moving (Die Hard 5).
Cinematographer Don Burgess has worked on a number of movies
that look great (notably his pairings with Robert Zemeckis and the first Spider-Man), but the look of T3 reminds me more of the horribly lit
later John Carpenter movies courtesy of Gary Kibbe. There’s no atmosphere in
the visuals. Nor is there tension in the editing. It’s not as if Mostow is
incompetent with his staging – the geography is all pretty clear – but
everything is so slow and flat. There’s no energy, and Marco Beltrami’s score
is barely even present.
The road chase early on is logistically crazier than
anything in T2, with its crane truck,
fire truck and assorted vehicular carnage, but it never becomes thrilling.
Combined with design work that is on the cheesy side (the drone planes, the
coffin Arnie carries on one shoulder, the “Terminatrix”’s hand/gun; basically
the ray gun that was mocked in the first movie) and a raft of tone-deaf
elements (the humour, the gore, the special effects), the only mesmerising
aspect on show is how aesthetically challenged the picture is.
Cameron flirted with self-parodic moments in T2, but they’re nothing to what we get
here. Arnie really isn’t much cop in this, although for a 55-year old he’s in
fairly extraordinary shape. His line deliveries are frequently too emotive, and
he seems willing to go for full send-up without understanding the line he’s
crossing.
The first 20 minutes seem more focussed on getting our Terminators
outfits than advancing the plot. So Arnie visits a strip club and gets some silly
shades. Kristanna Loken’s T-X meanwhile augments her breasts (but not her
career). Arnie gets an occasional gem (“Your
levity is good. It relieves tension and the fear of death”, “Relax!”) but mostly has to settle for
desperate crap like “Talk to the hand”,
“She’ll be back” and “I’m back”.
What might have been a great
scene – Arnie taken over by the T-X – is borderline risible as performed by
Arnie trying to resist while throwing his targets about rather than snapping
their spines.
I quite liked Earl Boen’s return as Dr Silverman, as by that
point in the show it’s clear it’s never going to become a wild thrill ride. He
drifts off into a reverie of how trauma can damage one’s memory before legging
it when Arnie appears in his line of sight. It’s more down to Boen that it’s
funny that the staging, however.
There’s nothing wrong with Loken per se, but she’s a female
Terminator purely because they haven’t done that yet, and she’s part T-800 part
T-1000 purely because they have no ideas at all about how to give the villain special
new skills. Apart from taking control of
other machines, which is much better on paper than in practice. Also, it’s
clear that the carefully conceived physicality of Patrick’s T-1000 has not been
applied to this new model.
As noted, her initially going round killing teenagers is a
decent enough idea, but it lacks any real tension or horror. Added to that, the
CGI used to render the T-X is pretty lousy. There’s also some weird gore – I
have no idea how her putting her arm through a cop’s chest from a back of the
car gets a 12 certificate. The Terminator on Terminator fighting is far from
enthralling, and occasionally funny for all the wrong reasons; Loken picking up
Arnie by the crotch and hurling him about just looks silly, not dramatic.
What of Nick Stahl as John Connor? Stahl’s a good actor, as
he showed in the too short-lived Carnivale
at about the same time. But he’s all wrong as a future resistance leader;
that future dream sequence (why have one Terminator when you can have 30?)
isn’t fooling anyone. One thing Salvation
did right was cast Christian Bale (until he started talking, at any rate). It
needed someone who could be believably desperate and ruthless. And no, he can’t
sell the “Terminatrix” line, but who could?
Danes fares little better, but I did find myself perversely entertained
by her clichéd cluelessness in response to the sci-fi world revealed to her.
The introduction of Kate Brewster to the mythology can get a free pass because
the timeline has changed, but drawing attention to the coincidences doesn’t
always make them any easier to swallow (John kissed her the day before he first
met Arnie? He just happened to be in her vet’s on the night the T-X comes to
kill her). Her dialogue is frequently
unintentionally funny too (“Die you
bitch!”)
I hadn’t seen Terminator
3: Rise of the Machines since taking its cinema release, so to a certain
extent it felt fairly fresh. Just not in a good way. This and Salvation took on something of the rod
for their own backs of the original Planet
of the Apes series, filling in the narrative gaps. Occasionally such an approach
can work, but it tends to be struggling against rote joining the dots if there
aren’t genuinely surprising or original individual story beats in the mix. The decimation
of the final scene of T3 achieves
that, but the rest of the picture is stillborn.
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