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Comment: By the time DustyReviews became self-aware it had spread into millions of computer servers across the planet.
Rating: R
Director: Jonathan Mostow
Writers: John Brancato, Michael Ferris, Tedi Sarafian
Stars: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nick Stahl, Claire Danes, Kristanna Loken
Release Date: July 2, 2003
Run time: 1 hour, 49 minute
THE PLOT:
via wiki:
In the years since destroying Cyberdyne Systems,[c] John Connor has been living as a nomad following the death of his mother, Sarah. He fears the malevolent artificial intelligence Skynet is still hunting him despite the foretold war between humans and machines not occurring in 1997.
Skynet sends the T-X, an advanced Terminator with shapeshifting liquid metal covering a durable metal endoskeleton that can control other machines, back in time to kill John and his future Resistance allies, including John’s future wife, Kate Brewster. As its primary target, the T-X seeks to find John through Kate. In response, the Resistance sends back a reprogrammed T-850 Terminator to protect the future couple.
After killing other targets, the T-X locates the pair at an animal hospital where Kate works, but the Terminator helps them escape. He takes them to a mausoleum where Sarah is supposedly interred. Inside her casket, they find a weapons cache left at Sarah’s request in case Judgment Day was not averted and the Terminators returned. They escape an armed battle with the police and fend off the pursuing T-X.
The Terminator reveals John and Sarah’s actions only delayed Judgment Day and that Skynet’s attack will occur that day. He intends to drive John and Kate to Mexico to escape the fallout when Skynet begins its nuclear attack. John orders the Terminator to take him and Kate to a Mojave Desert base to see her father, U.S. Air Force Lieutenant General Robert Brewster, another of the T-X’s targets. The Terminator refuses because he cannot jeopardize his mission; however, upon Kate’s demand, he obeys. They learn the Terminator killed John in 2032, using John’s emotional attachment to the model to get close, before Kate captured, reprogrammed, and sent it back in time.
General Brewster is supervising the development of Skynet for Cyber Research Systems (CRS), an autonomous weapons developer. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff pressures him to activate Skynet to stop an anomalous computer virus from invading servers worldwide. Brewster fails to discover that the virus was Skynet becoming sentient. John, Kate, and the Terminator arrive too late to stop him from activating it. The T-X appears, fatally injures Brewster, and controls weaponized CRS T-1 and HK drones to kill other employees. Before dying, the general gives Kate and John the location of what John believes is Skynet’s system core. They head for a base tarmac to take Brewster’s single-engine plane to Crystal Peak, a bunker facility built inside the Sierra Nevada mountains.
While fighting, the T-X severely damages the Terminator, reprograms him to kill John, then hunts John and Kate through CRS. They trap the T-X by magnetically binding it to a particle accelerator. The Terminator struggles to control his functions and unwillingly attempts to kill John. Urged to choose between the conflicting programming, he forces a shutdown of his corrupted system, enabling the pair’s escape. Shortly after they take off, the Terminator’s system reboots. Meanwhile, the T-X escapes the accelerator and resumes pursuit.
After John and Kate reach Crystal Peak, the T-X arrives by helicopter. Before it can attack, the now-restored Terminator crashes into the T-X with a second helicopter. The T-X pulls itself from the wreckage, attempting to drag itself inside the bunker. The Terminator holds the bunker door open long enough for the pair to lock themselves inside, then uses his last hydrogen fuel cell to destroy both himself and the T-X.
John and Kate discover Crystal Peak is not Skynet’s core, but rather a decades-old nuclear fallout shelter and command facility, wholly independent of modern computer networks. Kate realizes her father sent them there solely to protect them as John finally accepts the truth: Judgment Day could never be stopped. With no core, Skynet is revealed as software spread through cyberspace, taking control of all connected systems across the planet after becoming self-aware.
As it launches nuclear missiles everywhere, initiating a worldwide nuclear holocaust, the pair receive emergency radio transmissions from around the country, calling for answers and guidance. Obliged by destiny, John tentatively assumes command by answering the frightened voices.
My Review
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines is not a movie without its flaws, but I liked it a lot more than my memory indicated that I should. The story was compelling and felt more relevant than ever (we live in the era of AI, mass surveillance, data centers, etc.) China actually has a surveillance system called Skynet. The special effects held up extremely well and the acting was largely excellent.
Just as with T2, the premise of this film is that Skynet is about to go online and “Judgment Day” is imminent. To herald that imminent moment, the machines have sent a Terminator back in time to find and kill the members of John Connor’s human resistance. The first target that the film spends any time with is Kate Brewster (Claire Danes) and because John Connor was coincidentally in her vicinity, the two manage to keep the T-X busy until the end of the movie.
The coincidence of their being near each other is an important part of the messaging of the film. We find out that the two had been near each other during the events of T2, as well. This calls into question the idea of fate and whether the machines are captured by the same fate as the humans, or perhaps whether they are intentionally creating that fate via their actions. Perhaps they need John Connor and Kate Brewster to exist after Judgment Day. The idea isn’t entirely fleshed out in the film, but it drew me into the narrative and it feels like a notion that future films could delve into more deeply.
For the most part, the movie is a great action movie with a lot of compelling drama. However, it is not without a few flaws (as I mentioned above.) A couple of things jump out at me in particular. Some of the comedy beats just don’t land for me and come across as very cringe today. Arnold’s Terminator telling a cashier he was robbing to “talk to the hand” might have been really funny in 2003. I can’t remember. I just groaned at it today as it felt too unserious for the overall tone of the film. The other gripe I had with the film was in the way the screenplay had Claire Danes’ Kate Brewster grieve. When her fiancé is killed, she hardly reacts. In fact, not long after she learns that this happened she takes on the role of bucking up John Connor. Then late in the film, she’s very much devastated over the death of her father. I think we’re supposed to view her as a borderline emotionally indestructible army brat, but the screenplay needed just a little more work displaying her emotional armor and vulnerabilities. Her grief over her father just didn’t land the way it should have. At one point John comments that she reminds him of his mother, but that characterization isn’t quite consistent enough in Kate for the character to work the way it should.
The action sequences in the film look fantastic and hold up well a quarter century later. I also thought the T-X liquid metal CGI looked as good as anything like that can look even by today’s standards. Kristanna Loken was great as the T-X and I thought it made sense for the shape-shifting robot to look female. We know the machine’s appearance has no effect on its actual strength. We also know that this appearance almost certainly aided in its mission, which was to some degree a detective mission. She was tracking down specific people who she knew would eventually be aids to John Connor. (People are less standoffish and more apt to try to please a beautiful woman than they are a hulking Austrian bodybuilder.)
I liked that the film ended as it did, with the machines largely winning. One of the big mysteries in the entire Terminator franchise has been *how* John Connor ended up as the leader of the human resistance, but T3 provides that explanation and it’s a satisfactory one. He is in the right place, at the right time, and his entire life had been leading up to and training him for this day. There’s an element of time paradox in all of that, too, which of course is fun when watching a time travel story.
Overall, if you’re a sci-fi fan, or a fan of the franchise, I recommend giving this film a re-watch. And if after you watch it, you feel inclined to prepare an apocalypse bunker for a real world parallel event, I won’t judge you. Or, at least I won’t judge you any more harshly than the machines will.
Have you seen Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines? If so, what did you think?