Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

VERDICT:
6/10 Naughty Robots

Meh. It is what it is.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines takes place a good ten years or so after the events of Terminator 2: Judgment Day and the story is pretty much exactly the same.

Arnold is the good Terminator again and he gets sent back from the future to protect John Connor and his wife-to-be (the future leaders of the human resistance in the war against the machines) against a bad, sexy, pimped out Terminator (aptly named "The Terminatrix") that's been sent back from the future to kill him.

Granted, the writers of T3 had a hard act to follow, but is this really the best idea they could come up with? "Judgment Day...but with a stronger Terminator...and we'll make her hot! Brilliant!" It's not a bad movie, but I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd seen it all before. The strong storylines of the first two Terminator movies are big selling points for me, and this series really deserved a better story than the one it got with T3.

And while I'll give him credit for pulling off this role in his 50's, Arnold's Terminator in T3 is pretty lame. It's not that he's lost his touch or anything, it's just that he won't shut the hell up. Instead of the cut-to-the-chase, badass cyborg we all know and love/fear, someone on the writing staff screwed with Arnold's speech patterns and gave him free license to give long-winded, witty robot dialogues. Not to mention that he also gets really emotional at times, I'm talking "on-the-verge-of-robot-tears" emotional. It was like someone replaced his processing chip with Johnny-5's from Short Circuit. I don't want that Terminator. No one wants that Terminator. Boo, T3 writing staff.

But even though Terminator 3 has the depth of a Wal-Mart kiddie pool, it's still good popcorn fun. It's got some good action scenes and a lot of eye candy, but damn, this movie needed to bring back Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor in a bad way. And why wasn't Sarah Connor in the movie? Oh, because she died of lung cancer...from smoking too many cigarettes...not because she was fighting Terminators for a good portion of her life.

That. Is. Lame!

T3 doesn't have the heart of the first two Terminators and it makes for a pretty forgettable experience in comparison, but it's still worth seeing because, after all, it's a Terminator movie. It's not really adding to the series in any way other than moving the story along, but at least you'll be entertained by it.