I didn’t like it as much as the first two, but I didn’t think it was horrible like the rest of the internet seems to. My ranking 1 > 2 > 3.
I liked the ending in the bunker. And I liked seeing him push the button to turn on Skynet.
I like it, too.
It’s at a 6.6/10 on IMDB, so it’s not horribly rated.
Now Terminator: Salvation, that was kind of boring, actually.
I expected Salvation to be really bad from what I had heard, but it was better than I expected (although still nothing great). Entertaining enough to watch once, although I thought the ending was really lame.
You know, I used to hate T3. But after seeing the god-awful Salvation, I’ve grown to accept T3 as a slighty goofy transgression of the Terminator franchise. It doesn’t take itself too seriously and neither do I.
I thought it was okay. I’d see it again.
Mainly because it completely pissed all over T2’s (the far superior film, in every way) premise - “No fate but what we make for ourselves.” In T2 a big plot point was trying to stop Judgement Day and how the future is malleable depending on actions in the present. T3 says fie on this, Judgement Day and Skynet are inevitable, to find itself a plot.
I think this is part of the problem. Terminator 1 & 2 are each pretty good movies for what they are. The first movie especially was a lot better than anyone had any right to expect. Seriously, Arnie as a cyborg from the future coming to kill the mother of a future leader of humanity against the evil robot empire? The sequel was also a pretty darn good movie. The third, well, it just wasn’t all that great. So when compared to the first two it just comes off as being even worse.
As I said in a previous thread:
I found that one thing T3 suffered from was that it comes across as a parody of T2 at times.
T2: Arnie gets his leathers by stomping into a biker bar, walking up to the biggest biker, kicking his ass and taking his gear.
T3: Arnie gets his leathers from a male stripper. Talk to da hand!
T2: The T-1000 encounters a cop and guts him.
T3: The T-X encounters a cop and distracts him by inflating her boobs.
T2: The Terminator rocks some cool shades.
T3: The Terminator rocks some Elton John star-shaped glasses.
I still liked the movie but I think those things make one wonder if the makers of T3 were taking the whole thing seriously.
I think that’s part of the problem. T1 and T2 were very dark and ominous films. But it was also a very human film. It was as much about the effect on Sarah and John as it was about killer robots. T3 just seemed to lack that. It was just too much. Too goofy. Too over the top. It’s only in the last few minutes with John and Kate in the bunker as the bombs fell that T3 managed to capture the feeling of the first two films.
Terminator Salvation just didn’t make any sense.
It would have to be inevitable, otherwise there would be a paradox. From a certain point of view. I don’t know tech stuff.
From a story telling point of view, there has to be a Judgement Day so John Conner can realize his destiny. Otherwise he’s just a drifter with a crazy mom.
Besides, they did delay Judgement Day. But I have to think that such an event would be too large for them to prevent.
I thought each movie existed by its own rules. T2 had to change some things to have a plot (like Kyle Reese said they destroyed the time machine after he went through) and then T3 had to change some things. And I also thought T2 didn’t take itself entire seriously (chill out dickwad). It seemed like a parody of T1 at times (I thought the way they forced in the the “I’ll be back” line was kinda lame"
So I am not upset about T3 changing things from T2
I still think T1 is the best of the series, so maybe I am not as upset by the changes from T2 as the people who like T2 the most
The chase scene in T3 (with the crane truck) kicks major ass. The rest of the movie is okay, but that action sequence is what really stands out.
Any movie that relies on magical fate fairies is bad. It’s an extremely weak writing crutch, makes no sense, and is essentially magic.
The first terminator movies have a logical time travel story. The third one has magical fairies that alter reality in an infinite amount of subtle ways to steer the universe to how it’s supposed to be. There’s just no reason to go there, it’s weak.
On it’s own it’d be a decent action flick. It has some cool real non-CGI old school action sequences. Arnie acts more like a terminator than the touchy feely terminator of T2. But the basic premise of the plot is not only bad on its own, but shits over the previous series. The chick is also not nearly as convincing a bad guy as Robert Patrick.
T3 completely craps all over the entire point that T2 (eloquently) made.
Also, it changed John Connor, who we had last seen as a tough, streetwise kid with a vicious streak in T2, into a total pussy.
I loved Terminator Salvation, though, and as far as I’m concerned, the only canonical movies are Terminator, Terminator 2, and Terminator Salvation. T3 and the TV series don’t exist for me.
True in the way that they showed a different understanding of time travel – but not so different that they were impossible to combine in one theory. Only T4 doesn’t make much sense at all and can’t be integrated into the events as seen without giving up on logic.
T1 presents a loop in time: the events of the future start events in the past that will finally cause them. And though everyone seems to act freely, the path seems determined – if Kyle or the Terminator managed to change the sequence, they wouldn’t be there to change it in the first place.
We are left at the end with a grim outlook on the future: the almost complete eradication of humanity is not just inevitable, no, it’s worse by far: we might be stuck in a closed time loop as well. Which means that the future, any future at all, has stopped to exist. That’s the true Judgment Day the movie presents in the end: no future at all.
But wait … if the yet unborn John Connor is the offspring of a loop in time, and - as we learn in the final stages of T1 - even likely aware of it, how could he ever have been? Here it gets interesting. It’s not unreasonable to assume that T1 places us in a story that has already seen at least one time travel in the past – the one that led to the John Connor who is aware of time travel.
And before those events, shouldn’t there have been a “John Connor” who was not fathered by a man from the future but more in the old fashioned, one event at a time, way? That John Connor, the original one, was in some way either involved in the first rebellion against the singularity event or in the invention of time travel that was used during or after the crisis.
But this possibility does not point to a closed one-time-loop, such time mechanics allow at least a couple of loops that contain variations of the events and spiral upwards into a future that once seemed to be set but is substituted by another loop. Whether such a multi-loop might finally be closed or open, remained to be seen. Even though T1 looks like a closed loop (and was intended this way), it leaves room for alternatives.
T2 ponders such an alternative by adding some open-endedness, though less than the events themselves appear to show. And it discusses the interdependent duality of Skynet and John Connor further. Here we learn, that the events of T1 (or maybe even earlier ones) did not just cause John Connor but also Skynet.
Even though T2 ends hopeful, it starts with very bad news, worse news that many viewers seem to realize. In contrast to Kyle’s statement in T1, Skynet is still not defeated in the future that sent/will send both Terminators back. Worse, it has somehow been able to leap ahead in technology – as shown by the construction of the T-1000, a model that is not just a further development of the old T-800 series but something completely new and far more advanced.
We don’t learn how this could have happened but we have reason to assume that the pre-T2-Skynet is very aware of past time travel(s) and acted accordingly to counter counter-measures. It’s not clear why Skynet keeps sending machines back into the past but if it is indeed aware of the multi-layered time-events, it might have already realized that each time travel has improved its chances to finally turn things around, which also means that it has reason to believe that the time line wasn’t bent into an unescapable closed loop.
In that, Skynet is - once again - the rivaling sibling of John Connor.
Anyway, the events in T2 seem to tell uns that, as John put it, there is “No fate but what we make for ourselves.”
Is it?
T2 certainly proves (within the terminator-universe) that no simple determinism exists. But John and Sarah should have realised that from the start when the new batch of Terminators arrived. The future had already been altered. They changed it even further. But did they escape it?
T3 is a logical though depressing answer. No, they didn’t. In fact, we are left, as in the end of T1, with the uncomfortable question, if the loop might not be closed despite all the variations that we have seen so far?
It’s true, that the timeline of T1 has been pushed further into the future with each movie, which is a point in favour of the “no fate but what we make for ourselves”-faction. And the players as well as the events themselves have been altered by every loop. But no action broke the fundamentals of the situation: Skynet rises (= the singularity event occurs), it goes genocidal, a John Connor fights it back and another time travel is undertaken to redeem the situation.
So, is Judgment Day inevitable and, more importantly, is the loop finally closed?
These are two of the questions that are pondered in The Sarah Connor Chronicles. But the Terminator series was never just more or less clever self-reflection; its outlook beyond elevated it from entertainment toward art.
Are we subjects of forces or inherent necessities (as so many want us to believe) or do we make and shape history? What is sentience? And what will the singularity event mean when/if it happens?
All relevant questions that are discussed, among others, in the series - though not necessarily intelligently, as T4 proved.
This. The first two movies had some good bits of dark, wry humor in them but never deviated from being anything other than action films.
The third one, I felt like the filmmakers were going “nudge, nudge, see what we did there? Hey, Arnie in a gay bar, that’s hilarious right?” :rolleyes:
Don’t get me wrong. As a standalone action flick, it’s enjoyable enough. If I happen to catch it while flipping through the channels, I’ll stop and watch at least a few minutes. But all it too often it seems to go for the cheap laugh, rather than the emotional resonance that elevated the first two movies into great cinema.
I didn’t like Robert Patrick or the chick in T3
Except Groundhog Day.
It was goofier than Disney’s talking dog. It lacked menace. The violence was soft R at best.
I’ll preface this by saying that I’m not even a big fan of his, but James Cameron was very much missed. Brett Ratner or McG could’ve turned out the turd that was T3.
I agree. In T2 when they’re driving away fleeing from the T1000 and Sarah Connor is shooting back at it and runs out of ammo, John hands her another clip and says “Last one!” To me that is badass. This ~12 year old kid has been taught well and keeps a cool head in a very tense situation.