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The main question any self-respecting fan would have regarding Terminator
3 would be, what the hell is it this time? As $514 million
worth of worldwide viewers observed in 1991 at the end of
Terminator 2, having destroyed every last damned chip
of advanced equipment brought in from the future, young Edward
Furlong had, as he observed, gotten Cyberdyne by the balls.
Still, the Terminator franchise is no longer connected
with action auteur James Cameron and therefore has
lost all pressing reason to exist so, wisely, plot is the
last thing to be addressed; about halfway through the picture,
we discover that the youthful John Conner hadn’t stopped Judgment
Day, only postponed it. “Judgment Day,” proclaims the ever-stoical
Arnold Schwarzenegger, “is inevitable.” Ah well… so
much for the entire point of the previous installment.
As a wise Variety hack once observed, avoiding disaster
is not necessarily the same thing as success. As an action
movie, Terminator 3 is satisfying in the sense that
it brings an unprecedented amount of rampant destruction to
the screen, but totally irrelevant in a post-Matrix
environment, or even post-Matrix Reloaded. What that
series brought to the table was an emphasis on elaborately
choreographed, near-operatic action sequences which redeemed
the lifeless narrative surrounding them, as opposed to the
two Terminator’s combination of pulpy but skilled narrative
with non-stop action. But those two films practically reinvented
the action genre, while T3 is more like a parodic remake
of T2 than a sequel, as if someone wisely decided that,
since living up to the bar would be impossible, imitation
mixed with self-deprecation would have to do. So once again
Arnold’s first stop after being wormholed back in time is
a bar, but this time a male strip club. There’s a voice-over
again (this time John Conner’s, but equally as terrible as
Linda Hamilton’s). Even the f/x are largely unaltered,
except for atomic-bomb explosions: Those have been vastly
improved. (Oddly enough, some of the final hallway showdowns
between man and machine resemble nothing so much as the climactic
scenes of the unfairly maligned Robin Williams vehicle
Toys, only not as cool.)
Some changes have been made, but they’re more like regressions
than progress. In place of the typically ass-kicking female
provided by Cameron, a quivering Claire Danes spends
much of the film being smacked around and acting shrill (especially
during the first car chase, which delights in reaction shots
of her being tossed around helplessly). The only other female
on the scene is a female Terminator who is urged by a screaming
Danes toward the end to “Just die, you BITCH!” Furthermore,
while Cameron’s films exploited with remarkable focus and
lucidity fears of nuclear war, T3 is freaked out about
everything under the sun. The female Terminator inflicts violence
on kids (=threats to kids), at drive-in fast-food chains (=drive-by
shootings and urban violence), and at even more haphazard
locales (=those random shootings which have become sadly endemic
recently). There’s also a healthy dose of T2’s original
anti-technology paranoia filtered through The Matrix,
and some elemental mistrust of the government’s trustworthiness
and secretiveness.
None of this, however, will prepare you for the ridiculously
unnerving ending, which appears to have been manufactured
by the same branch of the government responsible for those
post-Sept. 11 “We can be scared. Or we can be ready” ads.
The planet explodes into an inevitable apocalypse as a solemn
John Conner intones the lesson he’s learned: “Judgment Day
couldn’t be prevented, only postponed. The challenge was to
reach out and survive it together.” (Question: Why bother
with the first two installments?) There’s a core of anger
somewhere deep in there at a lack of governmental preparation
for disaster, but it’s swallowed by the treacly pull-together
spirit.
Still, T3 is a respectable performance that offers
the snarky viewer plenty of alternate routes for contemplation
besides passive absorption. Are the constant seeming deaths
of Schwarzenegger’s Terminator followed by his increasingly
implausible resurrections a clever metaphor for the actor’s
career? Isn’t it great that such big advances in product placement
have been made that, compared with the sledgehammer approach
taken to promote Pepsi in T2, T3 offers merely
one small and far more subtle plug for Budweiser? Isn’t it
weird how Schwarzenegger’s career seems to constantly engage
with the issue of absentee fathers, from being the perfect
surrogate in T2 to learning to come to terms with divorce
in Kindergarten Cop to learning the importance of family
time in Jingle All The Way to this film, which offers
a weird fillip that contributes to the recent strain of cinematic
fathers (e.g., Royal Tenenbaum) who aren’t just neglectful
but actively harmful to their kids? T3 has no real
reason to exist, and it certainly isn’t so much a part of
a franchise as an effect of it, but there’s no shame in not
sucking and producing a relatively speedy and engaging self-parodic
action film. No real glory either, but OK.
--Vadim Rizov
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While we would never encourage anyone to destroy a video... 
