'Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines' Is a Terrific Sequel, No Matter What James Cameron Says
When can a blockbuster be both a success and a failure? When that blockbuster is 2003’s Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, the first attempt to continue the seminal sci-fi franchise beyond the imagination of its creator, James Cameron, who launched the series with 1984′s The Terminator. Undoing the open-ended finale of Cameron’s 1991 sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, T3 makes Judgment Day — when the machines rise up against their human masters — an unavoidable reality, sending another one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cyborg bodyguards back in time to protect mankind’s savior, John Connor, from perishing before the bombs start to fall.
Despite finding a way to move the Terminator franchise forward after a decade-long hiatus, today T3 seems like a mere footnote. In fact, it’s being effectively written out of continuity with the release of the new reboot, Terminator Genisys, which Cameron now says he considers to be the franchise’s “third film.” (The director made his feelings about Rise of the Machines and its sequel, 2009′s Terminator Salvation, clear in a Reddit AMA last year: “I’m not a big fan of the films…. I don’t think that the 3rd or 4th film lived up to that potential.”)
T3’s slide from favor is interesting considering that, at the time of its release, Rise of the Machines enjoyed a generally positive reception. Premiering over the Fourth of July weekend, the reportedly $200 million budgeted film opened in first place at the box office and went on to earn a worldwide gross of over $430 million. Critics mostly gave it passing grades as well, with Variety’s Todd McCarthy describing the film as “a hard-hitting, straight-ahead sci-fi actioner.” All told, T3 represented Schwarzenegger’s best action hero showing since Eraser seven years before and suggested that the Terminator brand still had a pulse even without James Cameron.
Watch a trailer for ‘Terminator 3:’
Cameron himself had actually toyed with the idea of making a third Terminator, even though the first two movies are ideal bookends in the way they trace the evolution of John’s mother Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) from a naïve young woman to a ferocious soldier. But Cameron walked away from the series for good in 1997, in the middle of a complex rights dispute. When the legal dust settled the following year, producers Andy Vajna and Mario Kassar were the full owners the franchise and the director’s chair sat vacant.
Enter Jonathan Mostow, a Hollywood journeyman who had steadily worked his way through the system in both film and television until he nabbed his breakout feature Breakdown, a 1997 Kurt Russell star vehicle that garnered critical praise and solid box office for its reliance on old-school practical effects and pedal-to-the-metal car chase sequences. He followed that up three years later with the solid World War II submarine thriller, U-571. In many ways, Mostow was an ideal replacement for Cameron. Like the first Terminator, Breakdown was a B-movie that played like an A-movie, with judicious pacing and close attention to the mechanics of cinematic action.
And pacing is a major reason why Rise of the Machines works as well as it does. Clocking in at a swift 109 minutes, two minutes longer than the original Terminator and 30 minutes shorter than T2, T3 unfolds in a 24-hour period — which we later learn is Judgment Day — and keeps the characters constantly on the move. Despite the inflated budget, it’s actually closer in spirit to Cameron’s stripped-down original, rather than the grander (and more grandiose) T2. On the commentary track included on the DVD, Mostow talks about how he worked to streamline the script until every action sequence and/or dramatic scene only served to propel the story. Even exposition is generally delivered on the run, rather than bringing the movie to a full stop so that Schwarzenegger’s Terminator can explain to the grown-up John Connor (played by Nick Stahl, who replaced T2’s Edward Furlong) and the audience why Judgment Day is back on track.
Mostow’s compulsion for streamlining led him to make one of the biggest and most controversial changes to the Terminator mythos. As he explains on the commentary track, T3’s original script was a “two-hander” revolving around John and Sarah (with Hamilton intended to return to the role she had originated in 1984). But in that scenario, Sarah’s storyline seemed perfunctory at best. Feeling that it would be “unfair to put Linda in the movie if she’s just going to be a third wheel,” Mostow decided to kill Mama Connor off before the movie began, having her succumb to leukemia still believing that she’d prevented Judgment Day.
Her son doesn’t enjoy the same peace of mind: As written and convincingly performed by Stahl, John is a PTSD-afflicted soldier of a war that hasn’t happened yet. He’s still living off the grid, moving from town to town, earning a living by working odd jobs and breaking into animal hospitals at night to find drugs that can help stave off his apocalyptic dreams. As much as Hamilton is missed from the movie, the tragedy of John’s plight is enhanced by Sarah’s absence. That also means that when Schwarzenegger’s Terminator re-appears, it knocks John’s fragile mind for another loop, both because it forces him to confront a future he’s tried to avoid and because he’s faced with the cyborg who, as he pointedly says, is the closest thing he ever had to a father.
In Hamilton’s place, T3 offers up two female characters vying for John’s attention. On the one hand, there’s Kate Brewster (Claire Danes), a previously unseen character from John’s past who winds up playing a big part in his present and future, as his eventual wife and second-in-command of the Resistance army. Pursuing Connor, meanwhile, is the T-X, an even more advanced killing machine that takes the form of a knockout blonde (Kristanna Loken). To be honest, neither character is particularly effective. Poor Danes is basically dragged from place to place by John and the Terminator, while the Loken’s T-X packs plenty of firepower, but lacks the instantly formidable presence of T2’s liquid killer Robert Patrick.
Mostow in part makes up for the latter problem by building some standout set-pieces around Loken’s character. The best of them is a 10-minute chase sequence through downtown Los Angeles that puts the T-X behind the wheel of a 160-ton crane that smashes Schwarzenegger’s outdated T-850 through multiple buildings. It’s a bigger, busier version of the chases Mostow staged in Breakdown, while still possessing the same kinetic energy and savvy sense of escalation. “My approach [to the film] was ‘I’m a Jim Cameron fan and this is the ultimate fan experience,” he explains on the commentary track. “Somebody has given me a gigantic sum of money to go out and make the film that I, as a fan of the other films, would want to see.” (Given how well Mostow handles the demands of taking over Cameron’s franchise, it’s surprising that his career tailed off after T3. It would be six years before he made another studio feature, the Bruce Willis sci-fi action movie, Surrogates, which came and went quickly in 2009.)
Watch a portion of the chase scene:
Perhaps the root cause of T3’s decline and fall within the overarching Terminator universe is its apocalyptic finale, which finds John and Kate in a fallout shelter while a self-aware Skynet rains nuclear destruction on the planet. It’s quite possibly the most cataclysmic end to a sci-fi sequel since Charlton Heston blew the planet of the apes to smithereens in Beneath the Planet of the Apes. (In fact, Mostow uses that franchise as a reference, commenting, “I don’t know of an ending to a big Hollywood movie that is such a shocker like this, probably since Planet of the Apes.“) On the one hand, that choice of ending is entirely logical. After all, Judgment Day is an event that has to occur if there was ever going to be a T4 — and there would be six years later in the form of the widely reviled Terminator Salvation, the first entry to take place entirely post-Judgment Day and to feature an adult John Connor (Christian Bale) waging an all-out battle against the machines.
At the same time, seeing the end of the world depicted so starkly does cut against the prevailing spirit of the series as summarized up by John’s famous line from T2: “There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.” Cameron’s films always took care to suggest that Judgment Day is something that can be averted through human ingenuity. T3’s attitude is more nihilistic. (It’s no wonder that Cameron isn’t a fan.) Which brings us back to that initial question about how a blockbuster can be both a success and a failure. As an action movie about killer robots from the future, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines is a fast-paced thrill ride. As a Terminator film, though, it seems fated to forever be a neglected dead end in the franchise’s future.
