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 was referring more to the metal-morph stuff, which seemed (to me, at least) to scream “Look at me, I’m a nifty new special effect!” every time it was shown. Meanwhile, we were already seeing basically the same thing every week on TV, on Deep Space Nine. And even if Skynet did have the technology to make a robot that way, it still makes a lot more sense to put the morph-metal over a solid skeleton, with built-in weapons, like the TX: Sure, you lose the ability to mimic a floor, or the like, but you can still imitate humans, you can use phased plasma rifles in the 40 watt range, and it’d have to be a heck of a lot easier to engineer.
T3 was one of the few movies I thought about walking out on. They turned John Connor into an idiot. In T2, I could see how the kid could grow up to become a great leader. In T3, he was old enough where this should be showing, but it wasn’t.
And then, there is how silly the movie was in general. When they take a good series of movies, and dumb them down and add unneeded comedy to attract the kids, it is a fail for me.
T1 was good. T2 Rocked. T4 was good as well. But T3 I don’t even count in the series. It’s like Indiana Jones 4. They best thing to do with it is pretend it never happened.
T2 still holds up fine. T3 is okay, but I’m still unclear about when exactly Skynet attains self-awareness. It’s fucking with communications everywhere (for funsies, I guess) and then Brewster flips a switch and blammo - nuclear war. The history described in T2 sounds better - a gradual integration, approve by Congress, of artificial intelligence systems in strategic bombers, then a wholly unexpected self-awareness… then blammo.
In T3 John Connor had a high-speed motorbike accident which he recovered from by self-medicating with horse tranquilizers. He was high for the whole movie.
I’m pretty sure the T-X activates it with her built-in modem. It had been coming along on its own but she accelerated it.
I also think T3 stands up reasonably well compared with T2. The original is the true classic. T2 is a cheesy sequel to that (albeit a fun one) and T3 continues much in the same vein. The dark ending was a great twist.
On the subject of other Arnie films, no love for “the sixth day”? Dumb, but fun.
I was a high school boy at the time, and thus presumably precisely in the most susceptible target audience… but I’ve never been more amazed by the effects in a movie than the first time I saw T2. I was a bit too young to have the “watch the opening scene of Star Wars on the big screen and the big star destroyer keeps going and going and going” experience that people talk about, but T2 – both with the morphing, and also the city getting nuked (which, granted, hasn’t held up very well in retrospect) – absolutely floored me. And it’s a good movie, too.
As for T3, I agree that it’s generally a fun movie. One underrated aspect, imho, is Claire Danes’ performance as John’s girlfriend. I think she does an unusually good job with a basically thankless damsel-in-distress role.
Yeah, the effects in T2 were considered pretty much cutting edge for movies at the time. I’ve never heard any criticism that they were already dated when the movie came out. That’s crazy talk. In the years following T2, you started to see similar effects more often as the technology became cheaper.
I agree with Chronos. I saw T2 in the theater when it came out, and remember being distracted by the special effects. The T-1000 also seemed to be much too advanced when compared to the T-800. (The terminators went from rubber skin over an endoskeleton to living tissue over an endoskeleton to…morphable liquid metal? :dubious:) Also, if Skynet had T-1000 models available in the future, it seems like it wouldn’t be too difficult to eradicate humanity with those rather than trying to change the past.
I actually didn’t particularly like T3 the first time I saw it, but it went up greatly in my estimation upon rewatching it a few years later.
yeah the T-1000 stretched my suspension of disbelief just a little too far. I can believe T-800s come from the future to kill people, but the T-1000 can just do anything and is indestructible. If it lived through all that stuff, why did the liquid steel kill it? Because it was too powerful and they couldn’t think of any better way to do it. And if it knew that that was the only way to destory itself, why was he standing so close to the ledge anyway.
They say in the movie that the T-1000 was the prototype. Which, granted, doesn’t say much for Skynet’s intelligence, sending back the only one without making copies first…
Well, if it succeeds in its mission it can just go wait in a bunker until time comes back around to when Skynet needs it, and if it fails it’s a moot point because Skynet won’t come online anyway. (At least not that particular incarnation of Skynet.)
The thing that I found implausible was that the T-800 in t2 was played by Arnie. The whole point of building robots with human skin over the top was so they could infiltrate the resistance posing as humans. Doesn’t really work if they all look identical.
Yeah, but remember the whole time travel thing was a last ditch move by Skynet to retroactively win the war. At that point it probably figured it had nothing to lose and everything to gain by sacrificing this one prototype.
The interpretation I’ve heard was that terminators were grown in small batches, maybe 3-5 identical ones. This would make production easier, but probably wouldn’t lead to too much greater risk of discovery, as long as you send them to infiltrate different human hideouts. The first Terminator was sent back just before the humans overran that installation, so when they took the opportunity to reprogram one, it was one from the same batch that produced the one Skynet sent to kill Sara.
The one in T3, meanwhile, was a more advanced model, but was deliberately designed to look like the one in T2, in the hopes that John Connor would be a little slower to fight back against his childhood protector. It worked, too.