Slashdot Mirror
Review of T3: Rise of the Machines
Let me first draw your attention to CNN's review. The CNN reviewer tells you this "darker and slicker" sequel is "worth the wait," gives you the long-form plot setup, shows you the sexy look of the "babe-a-licious" babe, and promises you "emotional weight" with "wit" and a "stunning and thought-provoking" climax. What he doesn't mention is that CNN and the movie's producer/distributor are both owned by AOL Time Warner.
It's been ten years since I watched the first Terminator and maybe I'm remembering it better than it was. But it had an emotional depth, a heart that neither of its sequels matched. T3 is slicker, yes, but darker!? It's light fluff. The nightmare of nuclear destruction in the original was rendered without CG effects, but I'll remember the skeleton clutching the chain-link fence long after I've forgotten this week's pixel-perfect explosions. And the "storm is coming" ending of the original was genuinely thought-provoking, with a chilling resolve that just embarrasses this week's Hollywood ending. Claire Danes is no Linda Hamilton.
The effects are what you'd expect from a modern zillion-dollar action movie, but not groundbreaking the way that T2's were at the time.
I found nothing about it witty. I chuckled through the chase scenes -- it's mostly chase scenes -- because they were so over-the-top and the plot holes were so glaring. Apart from that, there was only one funny line. (I assume everyone else is as bored as I am with the "dry cool wit like that" dialogue.)
Best unintentionally funny line: "I've got enough C-4 to blow up ten supercomputers!"
Best unintentionally funny visual: tie between fumble for the car keys, and offscreen killing sprays blood across photo.
Dumbest joke: gratuitous mocking of effeminate guy.
Best absurd effect: missile blows apart the wall in a small office ten feet from our heroes, they avoid injury by diving to floor. Duck and cover!
Best plot hole: Terminatrix's chronic failure to remember that she can run fast.
Heavy on the exposition, light on brains and heart, forgettable. See it if you really jones for big trucks smashing stuff. If you just have to see a movie, see "28 Days Later" instead. Rated R, not recommended for anyone whose mental age matches their valid ID.
The one thing I really dislike about the idea of T3 is the complete disregard for the basic premise set up in T2 (or even T1 for that matter). In T2 we see the Terminator and the T-1000 completely melt away. All research work into the project from recovered parts of the original terminator, have been destroyed, so there should be no skynet, no rise of the machines. If sky-net had this kind of advanced Terminator (T-X), why didn't it send that one back for T1 and it probably would have succeeded. There are almost 2 timelines to worry about here and they seem to be going in parallel.
The same sort of thing happened with the Highlander series. The 2 sequels completely disregarded the premise and plot/story lines set forth in the original (which was awesome). Very disappointed.
-- DuckWing
There are, of course, some frustrating sequences in the movie. That's the problem with having such an overpowered villian: they show off all their powerful weapons to make you afraid, but then they can never use them against the heroes.
If only more people thought like that. And if only some of the people that did think like that were film directors.
I've posted before to this board that I dislike the increasing reliance on CGI in films. A fair point to make is that once upon a time The Last Starfighter was considered pixel-perfect, but now look. CGI dates a film really fast, because graphics improve all the time.
Cheers,
Ian
T3 had too many gratuitous arnold-lines. "Ill be back" "She'll be back" "Get off." "I like this car."
i mean damn. But other than that, and a few other quibbles, it was a GREAT movie. I mean, it was a Terminator movie at heart. It was about the inevitablity of a horrific event that everyone was trying to stop, but couldnt. It even had a touch of the unwilling messiah theme going.
Really for me it all hinged on the end. The end of Terminator 1 was bleak but hopefull. Judgement Day was coming, but Sarah would have a son who would save the human race.
The end of Terminator 2 was bleak but hopeful. They thought theyd stopped judgement day, but they couldnt be quite sure.
If T3 had ended with a happy, for-sure avoidance of judgement day, i wouldve hated the movie, because it wouldve abandoned the theme. but no. Thankfully, the end of Terminator 3 was bleak but hopeful. Judgement day was fucking inevitable, and the best you could do was to do your best afterwards.
so i thought it was great, and i consider myself a fair if not good judge of movies. make your own choice of course.
While I will most certainly agree that tossing some random naked chicks into a movie can't make up for a bad movie overall, it's not like said random naked chick can actually turn a good movie into a bad movie (unless, I suppose, it was a kids movie). If they're not replacing good content with nudity, then who cares? When it's a question of breasts vs. another ten seconds of a car chase, I'll take the breasts, thank you very much.
Now let's play "guess my age and gender!"
Uh...the whole of Dracula is a metaphor for sex, dude. You must have sexiness in a proper Dracula or you haven't done it right.
I'm not a scholar on Dracula, but in that story's case, the plot is dependant on sex (i.e., the horror of being seduced by some monster). That doesn't bother me. What I don't like is when some hot babe is put into a potentially thoughtful sci-fi or horror movie just to reel in the 13-year-old boys. It's not that I'm a prude, it's just that sometimes I'm more interested in seeing actual ideas explored rather than some scantily-clad blonde who looks like every other billboard-queen out there.
As far as plot justification goes (I haven't seen the movie yet) there is an existing explanation for why the time travellers need to go sans-clothing. As far as I'm concerned, a movie that gets rated PG means the director/script-writer pulled punches and sacrificed content so the uptight censorship idiots won't get their chastity belts in a knot. The real world features violence, nudity, sex, offensive language and concepts. Deal with it... there is no reason to sanitize and dumb down a story so that the over-sensitive can handle it.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
I always thought that the series, especially the second, had an underlying moral that was offensive to me. That moral is that technology, beyond a certain point, should not be researched, that there are sanctimoniously-pronounced Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. The morality is over a hundred years old (except Frankenstein's monster had much better dialogue), but the presentation has the advantage of technological wizardry. Oh, sweet irony.
I can imagine the offscreen dialogue at the end of "T2":
World-Saving Heroes: Well, we've saved your asses.
Unwittingly Evil Scientists: Thanks!
WSH: Now, remember, no more robotics or artificial intelligence; it'll destroy humanity, and there's no way we can ensure that it doesn't.
UES: Umm. Right. So, guys, you want to... uh, take up pottery?
[rumble of sanctimonious approval]
And did I mention that Linda Hamilton's speech about the wonders of childbirth was possibly the most disgusting thing committed to celluloid in the last ten years? I think "T2" probably did as much for a shortage of kids becoming scientists as anything else.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca