Structurally, the screenwriters have opted for the template of the previous films (chase, fight scene, exposition, chase, fight scene, exposition, etc). And plot-wise, it’s the same story. A bad Terminator, the T-X (Kristanna Loken), has been sent to kill the future resistance leader, John Connor (Nik Stahl), and a good Terminator, the T-800 (Schwarzenegger), sent to save him. Plus, there’s the usual apocalyptic mumbo jumbo about Judgment Day and machines destroying mankind.
The fundamentals may still apply as time, and Terminators, go by. However, there are some significant changes. When we last saw John Connor, he was a cute kid who had helped save the world. Now, he’s a 22-year-old exile from normal life who looks like a down-and-out. Connor tells us he “lives off the grid” — no job, no phone, no home — in the hope that he can stop some future Terminator tracking him down. Then, one day, a T-X Terminator turns up and his nightmare starts all over again. The bad news is that this T-X is the most sophisticated killing machine ever created; the good news is that she’s a sexy blonde who can make her breasts expand on command. This bionic babe is a high-tech Swiss Army knife in leather who knows how to get what she wants from life. “I like your car,” she says to one woman, before taking her car. “I like your gun,” she says to a cop, before taking his gun. The T-X could have done with a little more personality and fewer gadgets. But Loken plays her with a precise, metallic coldness that is chilling.
The other lead female role is that of the sweet veterinarian Kate Brewster (Claire Danes), who is also on the T-X’s hit list. It’s a bland, scream-and-blub role, and the once- quirky Danes is wasted here as an action- heroine-in-the-making. Then there’s the big man himself. Nobody does a cyborg with such effortless authenticity as Arnie. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have any new one-liners to match his greatest hits, and he seems less human and thus less lovable. In T2, Cameron created comedy and pathos in Arnie’s attempts to understand the young Connor. But here, there’s no personal intimacy with either John or Kate. Mostow’s Terminator is just another machine with a mission. This may sound strange, but T3 doesn’t have any emotional depth to it.
Cameron is a director who really believes that taking up arms and trying to stop a nuclear holocaust and armies of red-eye cyborg skeletons is really good for the development of a person’s character, and he has the visual panache to make his silly nuclear-nightmare scenario seem scary. Mostow has a go, but his heart isn’t in it. Instead of the dark poetry of apocalypse, he is more at home with the punch lines of self-referential parody. One of the better gags comes when Arnie steps out of a bar in a new set of leather clothes. We watch as he adds the final touch to his fearsome look — but instead of his sinister shades, he puts on a pair of oh-so-gay rhinestone glasses.
When it comes to special effects, CGI fans might complain that there is nothing as startling here as when we saw Robert Patrick go from mercurial blob to a cyborg in T2. But what’s great about T3 is its low-tech charm. Instead of all the post-Matrix balletic ponceyness we see in most sci-fi films these days, here we get good old-fashioned fight scenes, real buildings being blown up and whole streets demolished. Watching the two Terminators battle it out (especially in the great toilet scene) is like watching a demolition derby, a glorious celebration of crash and carnage. T3 would be a fitting way to finish the series, but, alas, he will be back.
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Terminator 3, 12A, 109 mins, Two stars