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Threevisited
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Those wondering if the third instalment of the Terminator
series matches the entertainment value of the James
Cameron films Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
or The Terminator (1984) will be pleased to
note that Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines does
not let down in the amounts of explosions, vehicle smashing,
guns blazing and robots fighting.
Each
Terminator, however, seems to get progressively
more sacharrine, less cold-blooded. The original
film had the constant feeling of fear as the soft-fleshed
humans fled from the unstoppable killing machine who
broke through walls, destroyed cars and gunned down
whole police forces. Terminator 2, which I
had my problems with, had the heavy-handed theme of
armageddon and race survival driving the characters
forward but softened it somewhat with the T-800's pseudo-fatherhood
of the adolescent John Connor, the future leader of
the human resistance. In Rise of the Machines,
the Terminator returns to not only protect the adult
John but acts as matchmaker as he brings John together
with his future wife, Kate. It
seems that the deadly future of machine-ruled apocalypse
was only postponed by the events of the second movie.
Now, a new Terminator model, the T-X has come from the
past to not only eliminate John Connor but the nascent
rebel heroes who help him in the future. (The T-X is
played by some supermodel come to take Natasha Henstridge's
lock on naked science fiction killer roles away from
her.)
Lest
this sound like T3 is Father of the Bride
with explosions I will tell you it is not. Director
Jonathan Mostow capably guides the film through probably
more mayhem that either of the first two films combined.
However, what T3 lacks over the first two films is a
driving script that pushes the action forward and gives
the characters an impetus beyond merely surviving to
the next scene. James Cameron is justifiably praised
as an action director but he, over the present writers,
also is a superb plotter, knowing just when to hit the
marks, when to rev up the action and how to structure
a film so that it resounds.
Throughout
Terminator 3, I got the sense that the writers
were self-consciously trying to top elements of its
predecessors scene for scene, line for line. There are
the nudge-wink references to the earlier films, the
bar scene, the one-liners that are only funny having
seen numbers one and two and set piece chases that throw
up more metal. These are all elements that satisfy by
themselves. Less than satisfying is that the movie seems
to get smaller as it winds up to its conclusion.
Even the spectre of nuclear war seems less than horrible,
antiseptic even, when the bloodless action that lead
up to the end elicits a shrug. Consider that the first
Terminator movie revived science fiction as an action
genre because of its gun fetish, its hero the cyborg
who resorted to messy and indiscriminate machineguns
and assault rifles instead of phasors and lasers. The
villain in T3 is a makeup model whose hair is always
restored after every fight, who would have disposed
of her targets long ago if only she eschewed her complicated
nano-weapons for an Uzi. Terminator 3 does
not have any fetish.
More
importantly, the message of warning that T3 carries
against supercomputers taking control over human military
networks is treated as a matter of fact, perhaps as
if having seen the previous two movies, they don't want
to spend any time making it real. But this doesn't help
the film's missing sense of dread nor does it match
a whammy of an ending that sounds good in the retelling
but lacks impact without a proper windup.
As the T-800, Arnold Schwarzenegger is about as good
as he ever has been, a little smaller and gravelly-voiced,
perhaps. As John Connor and wife-to-be Kate, Nick Stahl
and Claire Danes are just serviceable. Danes gets points
for not being the damsel in distress but the crusty
Stahl is only a marginal improvement over the whiny
adolescent John Connor. His flat delivery doesn't add
anything to the feeling that the real hero is to be
revealed in some Terminator sequel in the future.
In
theatres now
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