The Terminator (1984) was one of the best movies of its kind, with a relentless forward drive and superb, scary action sequences. It also gave Arnold Schwarzenegger his perfect role: a robot. This plays to Schwarzenegger’s strengths — his grotesque body-builder’s body (so heavily muscled that it might be called post-human), and the robotic quality of his German-accented diction.
The second Terminator movie (1991), directed like the first by James Cameron, lacked only the element of surprise: otherwise, it had everything the first one did, with more excitement, and two Terminators. It transvalued the Schwarzenegger killer-robot, making him a protector rather than a destroyer, and then upped the ante by putting him up against a later-model robot assassin. Now, satisfyingly, we had robot-on-robot violence as well as robot-on-human violence. Like the first Terminator, this updated one proved very hard to terminate, allowing for climax upon climax, or at least for a long, drawn-out climax that seemed to ratchet itself up a notch each time the creature lurched once more to his feet. (Does that, one wonders, make it a female climax?)
Eventually, and inevitably, here comes the third Terminator movie. It has lost its ”The”, going as Terminator III: Rise of the Machines. In fact, for those in the know, it’s going as T3, simple as that. The plot is much the same as T2, with yet another Terminator arriving from the future to kill John Connor (Nick Stahl), who is now in his 20s. In the first movie he was as yet unborn (thus his mother was marked for death), and in the second he was a teenager. Connor has to be taken out by the machines before he becomes leader of the resistance to their programme of global domination. Of course they would probably have had better luck had they come from the future to wipe out Bill Gates, who seems dedicated to making computers as stupid as possible, but then we would have been rooting for the robots instead of the humans.
The innovation in T3 is that the new-model Terminator is female. She is a ”Terminatrix” or T-X, and she’s played by Kristanna Loken as a sort of über-model with electronic claws. This is a good idea, though Loken could perhaps have been given a joke or two, which worked so well for Schwarzenegger in the first movie. You will recall how much mileage he got from one word — ”Asshole”, pronounced ”Azol”. In T3, he gets the occasional funny line, though the most amusing moment involves a pair of sunglasses. Unfortunately, the filmmakers foreclose on the option of keeping this particularly bizarre pair on Schwarzenegger’s face throughout the movie. That would have been hilarious, but I suppose that — amid all this sentimental saviour stuff and his being trounced repeatedly by a woman — he had to keep his dignity in some way.
T3 is not directed by Cameron, who presumably has other and bigger fish to fry in the post-Titanic universe. Jonathan Mostow is now at the helm, and he does a workmanlike job, but is not able to trump T2 in the way T2 trumped T1. All goes well up to and including a wonderful rampage of destruction in which the Terminatrix, driving a huge crane-truck, pursues her quarry through, and I mean through, a whole town.
T3 is worth seeing just for this magnificent orgy of wanton vandalism, though the rest of the movie feels like a let-down. The so-called climax, for instance, just can’t match that smashing sequence. Cameron would not have made the same mistake.