Lumpy, I would explain but I know not how to make Spoiler boxes.
Spoiler boxes can be made like this {spoiler}Insert text weenies don’t want to read here.{/spoiler} Use instead of { }, hit “Preview Reply” to make sure you’ve gotten it right, and then post it. That simple.
Can someone point me to the T3 SPOILER thread? These boxes are hella annoying.
And Supernova, are you absolutely sure? Because it doesn’t quite make sense.
…
because if that’s the exact same unit, well, first, I don’t think there’s any possibility that it’s alive after it blew up both of its fuel cells. Second, what you’re saying makes absolutely no sense. You’re saying it was an infiltrator unit that was picked because of John’s emotional attachment to it. After it killed John, the rebels sent it back in time, where it actually formed the emotional attachment? Ah yes, the time travel paradoxes. Either way, the first point should be enough unless I misinterpreted.
Ian Fan
The terminator in T2 and T3 were different units. The one that killed John C. in the future is the one that was sent back for T3, but not the one in T2.
Yes, that is what I think. Did you read what I wrote?
Hey, I like those spoiler boxes - that’s a great idea. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I liked the first two. This isn’t usually my “genre,” either. My worry with T3 is that - like MIB2, Spy Kids2 and a few others (I thought) - they will sacrifice the plot and script and just fill it with special effects. I’m getting tired of that in movies.
OK… I’ll have a go at this one:
[spoiler]You are incorrect in thinking that “it’s alive after it blew up both of its fuel cells.” This unit (the T3 Arnold) was created in the future by Skynet to infiltrate the humans. They made him look exactly like the unit sent back in time in 1991 (that was destroyed at the end of T2, I believe) because the 13 year old (or 10 year old, whatever) John Conner formed an emotional tie with that specific human-looking model. So this one LOOKS EXACTLY like that one (assembly-line manufacture and all) specifically to get close to John Conner because of those emotional ties.
Of course, I agree that this is particularly stupid on the part of John Conner, but I’m just explaining what they said in the movie.
Back to the timeline: so this model is created in the future by Skynet, and after he kills John Conner he is captured and reprogrammed by the rebels who now send him back in time to protect John Conner’s lieutenants (that is who the Terminatrix is actually sent back to kill, as they do not have any records on the whereabouts of John Conner. She “accidentally” comes across him by testing the DNA of the blood he has left at Claire Danes vet clinic after breaking in there, and then goes after him as well).
I keep digressing… to get to the point, when the T3 Arnold is destroyed by losing the two fuel cells (and being nuclear bombed) at the end of T3, this has happened AFTER he has killed John Conner in the future. In our time it is chronologically before, but in Arnold T3’s personal timeline, it happened AFTER, so no contradiction there.[/spoiler]
My opinion: it was a good action thriller, but not as good as the first two. I just re-watched the first one the other night, but did not re-watch the second.
So the psychiatrist was very funny, but I did not remember if he was also in the second movie.
I think my main objection is that
[spoiler]the “message” is so far afield from the first two. For the most part, it seems that a main theme from the first two is that “your future is what you make it” and that nothing is “etched in stone,” as it were. This one seems to preach the opposite, that what is destined to happen will happen no matter what you do.
Some particular sticky points: the obvious stupidity that must have been demonstrated by John Connor by letting a human that he would recognize on site as a Terminator anywhere near him.
In the first movie, at least, they made a big deal that dogs can tell the difference between a real human and a Terminator. Scenes from 2094 show the humans using dogs on their bases to alert them to a presence of a (non-Arnold-looking) Terminator in their midsts, and in 1984 LA dogs bark at Arnold. Why not have dogs at the Vet clinic barking at the Terminatrix?
The new Terminatrix did not seem like any big advancement over the T2 Terminator. She added the ability to “control other machines.” Big deal. Robert Patrick was better.
Not that this has anything to do with the plot, but why no female nudity? They make a big deal that she is naked, but never reveal anything. It was an R rated movie, for God’s sake! Sheesh.
I do remember from T2 that the guy who invented Skynet used technology from the discovered T1 hand to create the technology used to create Skynet. Yet this version of Skynet was nothing special at all. Just the current state of networking, it seems to me, with the Military going overboard in allowing the networks capacity to control weapons, etc. Maybe this was cut or something, but there is no explanation at all of how this network became “self-aware” and (I assume) instituted what the humans thought was a virus to cripple other systems so the humans would have to invoke Skynet’s authority to keep control. Or maybe I’m doing too much of the writing myself now. Well, that’s my point.
I also fail to see how after the necessary nuclear damage that must be present to wipe out most humans there could still be computers and machines around with the capability of creating factories and building other machines. Maybe we’ll see the real explanation in Matrix: Revolution.
I was going to write how it was an amazing coincidence that John Conner happens to break into the Vet clinic of the person who ends up being his wife in the future; but I just realized it is the other way around: it is because he broke into her clinic that she gets caught up in the plot and that is why they are thrown together and get saved together so naturally they would fall in love, etc…
But wait: it’s still a too-amazing-for-words coincidence that the woman who comes into the vet clinic he broke into would be the daughter of the guy in charge of Skynet… but this adventure for her doesn’t happen because John Conner broke into her clinic, it happens beacause the Terminatrix is there to kill her because she becomes a lieutenant in the resistance “because of her military ties.”
My brain is starting to hurt. Y’know, someone once told me that time-travel movies never hold up to logical inspection. I think they may be right.[/spoiler]
richardb,
You’re missing the point… they were destined ot be together. Wether it was because they met ‘making out’ in that kids basement, or wether it was later because he broke into the clinic. That’s the whole point; they changed history in T2, but fate catches up in T3, and they meet anyway.
Now, I really like the movie. Much better than I thought, and it got much better after the first 40 or so minutes.
I really thought the truck chase scene was just something they wanted to improve on from T2, and that the whole movie would end up being a bad spin-off. It go tmuch better once theybegan to explain the associations of characters.
Somethings did bother me though,
The modem handshake. How was that understood by the host over a cell phone from a car with the top down travelling that fast? I’d think the call would break up enough to not establish communications.
Some of the comedy seemed forced, but they seemed to get more serious in the second half. (Can’t Arnie get clothes from anywhere else but a biker bar?)
The T-chick takes a lot of punishment! Oddly, nobody in my theater groaned until she took the urinal in the head though…funny how we identify to some stuff like that. Like in T2, nobody batted an eye when Rob Patrick killed the cop, but when he touched that dog…
Lastly, just to address any glitches in the storyline and timeline. Simply put, the basic idea is that changes of any kind in the ‘past’, will effect the ‘future’ in many undetermined ways. Think ‘Jurassic Park’ here for a second, using the chaos theory. “A butterfly flaps it’s wings in Central Park, and you get rain instead of sun in the Bahamas”. That’s because of the results a chain of unpredictable events that work together to alter the happenings of things around it.
So, applying that theory, any number of little things in T2 could/would have affected the outcome in the ‘future’, and made adjustments necessary.
Aside from the plot holes mentioned above, I was also wondering how
the T-100 was able to remove his second fuel cell and continue functioning afterwards (even if only for a few seconds).
In general, though, although I did enjoy the movie and will definitely buy it on DVD to watch again and again, I can’t stop thinking that
[spoiler]
it basically took the premise of the first two movies and tossed it in the trash. I mean, the whole point of the first two movies was that “there is no fate” and that it is possible to change the future. This movie, however, reveals that there is no escaping fate – it can only be postponed. To me, this really seemed like a total slap in the face of James Cameron ("not only am I going to make a sequel to your two films, but I’m going to make it so your two films are proven to be “wrong.”)
Of course, this is exactly what Matrix: Reloaded did with The Matrix, but at least those films were both made by the same people.[/spoiler]
Barry
Well, godzilla,
I can take the battery out of my laptop to change it, and the computer will still run for a few minutes. The fuel cell isn’t a battery; there’s probably a battery inside the Terminator somewhere.
Overall I found the movie very disappointing. It just seemed… short. I never got involved in it. The truck chase was terrific, though. And the twist at the end was daring and cool.
Well, I understand what you’re saying, but the reality is that is the exact reason why I didn’t like it (as much).
For two reasons:
[spoiler]First, as I said before and as godzillatemple so eloquently expanded on, the message of “destiny set to happen and can’t be changed” was so diametrically opposed to the message of the first two movies. I did not like that.
Second, ridiculous unexplained coincidences are not good in anything other than a farcical comedy. The movies up to this point (and a good part of this one, too) had rational, even plot-driven explanations of those coincidences. In the instances I mentioned, there was no explanation at all, other than pure chance. That does not make for a satisfying story.
Actually, the first two movies kind of played with these paradoxes. In the first movie, Reese, the best friend of John Conner, has in the future fallen in love with a woman who John Conner had given a picture of to him and told him stories about. When someone needs to go on a “one-way” mission back in time to protect her, Reese volunteers and ends up fathering the baby that ends up being his best friend in the future (and providing a picture and stories of his mother to him). It is his going back in time that creates the scenario that allows him to later go back in time. You can’t really think too deeply about that one, as it doesn’t stand up to logical thought. Same with the second movie: it is an artifact of the first Terminator that went back in time that provides the technology for the system that ends up sending back the Terminator through time.
The first two movies present these paradoxes without even trying to explain them. Because they are not really germaine to the current plot of the movie in which they are presented, they can be left unexplained without harm to the movie.
Maybe it was just inevitable that as the saga continued these kind of paradoxes would catch up with the script, and that is what happens here. Yet I still don’t buy that because of some nebulous concept called “destiny” John Conner just “happens” for no good reason at all to end up at the location of the daughter of the guy who is in charge of Skynet at the exact same time the terminatrix shows up to kill her. If she had no connection to Skynet other than the fact that she becomes Conners wife and a member of the resistance, then I would say it all makes perfect sense. She and John Conner are there when the Terminatrix comes to get her, the Arnold-Terminator helps them both escape, and they end up surviving the initial Skynet blast and later starting the resistance together. That is why the Terminatrix comes back to get her. This is still a time travel paradox, but a similar one to the ones I’ve pointed out from the first two movies. Havng her faher be the one in charge of Skynet is just too much of a coincidence, and it seems to me that this is just sloppy screenwriting (or they just couldn’t figure out another way to introduce the machines at the military base).
Or am I missing some deeper connection here?[/spoiler]
I still enjoyed the movie. That chase scene was wonderfully over-the-top destructive, and everyone, especially Arnold was good, etc. It just wasn’t quite the great movies that T1 and T2 were.
Time travel paradoxes (paradoxi? paradoxen? pair-o-doxies?) are the main reason I believe that time travel is not possible. Larry Niven has stated it as a law: “If time travel is possible, and changing the past is possible, then no time travel will happen.” Or words to that effect. The logic is this–if it is possible to change the past, then people will do it. Any number of changes can happen until there is a time-line where no time travel happens, then no more changes happen and we have a time-line with no time travel.
So your willing suspension of disbelief has to include time travel and changing the past if you want to watch T1, T2, T3, T4…that means paradoxes–ya just get 'em, like it or not.
IMHO, the best time-loop story is “By His Bootstraps” by Robert Heinlein.
I liked T3. Arnie looks good–just a bit of sag under the chin. I found it funny, mostly the many references to the other films and the over-the-top chase/destruction sequences.
I agree with many others that the philosophical thrust has changed. Bummer.
I think you might be:
It wasn’t a coincidence at all. In the back of the animal truck (after ripping off the gas station), John figures out that he met Arnie (in T2) the day after his smooch in the basement with Whats-her-face (Claire Daines).
Thereby disrupting the natural course of events that would have seen them end up as friends and eventually, John gets involved with Skynet through her father. Maybe she gets him a job working with her Father which is how he gets involved in the Skynet project, who knows, because none of that came to be 'cause T2 happened and they had to go on the run.
Their course of destiny was changed because of an attempt to mess with the course of History from the ‘future’.
Fast forward to T3. Because their initial meeting was interrupted, fate brought them together again under somewhat different circumstances. (He breaks into the Vet shelter, she works there).
See, it’s not a coincidence to end all coincidences, it’s supposed to happen because they fight the resistence in the future (and don’t forget their kids play an important role, according to Arnie).
Try to imagine John Connor’s life had no Terminators been sent back to kill him:
-He kisses a girl in a friend’s basement, and she develops a crush on him.
-A romance blooms, and lasts through high-school.
-They eventually get married.
-Skynet gets out of control and takes over the computers of the world.
-John and his wife end up surviving the blast beacuse they are hidden away in a shelter by her Father, who may have put them there voluntarily (if he were allowed to field test Skynet when he felt it was ready, not when put under the gun by the Pentagon.)
-A few others survive under different circumstances, (Remember, John didn’t necessairly know his future ‘Lieutenants’ in his childhood) and together the form a rebellion that would bring Skynet down.
-The future-bots see this happen (in the future) and to prevent it, the send a Terminator back in time to kill John Connor’s mother before he’s even born …here we are in part 1.
Now, on the surface this does fly in the face of the underlying message of the first 2 movies; that fate is undetermined, and can be changed.
But, it can also be said that the original message of “Destiny can be changed” stands true, with the caveat of “but you can’t control the way it will change”.
So, some things are meant to be. Judgement day, for example in the movie.
Judgement Day itself can be altered by altering the events leading up to it. In this case via time travel.
The catch being, once you make those changes any number of undetermined events can also happen or be changed in a totally unpredictable way.
Of course, the underlying message is, if something is important enough (saving the world by bringing down the bots in 2042) it will find a way to happen, no matter what.
I though it was far too short also. The chase was great, but it was too bad it happened before the development of the storyline; I thought they were headed for a poor sequel filled with bigger and better explosions over the same story line (See Jurassic Park).
It wasn’t as good as T1 or T2, for sure, but still very good. It would be interesting to see if they go ahead and do the 4th installment .
Okay, once again, did you read what I wrote? You quoted me completely out of context. I said “I don’t think there’s any possibility that it’s alive after it blew up both of its fuel cells.” I never said it was the exact same unit. I was saying the opposite, I was merely giving the other poster the benefit of the doubt, something which I surely have not received.
There are a few missed opportunities in the time-travel aspects that could have tied the movies together more neatly:
[spoiler]T3 Arnold could have revealed that future Kate Brewster wrote her memoirs after the humans won the war, and that she included factual information about her encounters with John Connor at the make-out party and at the vet’s office. Skynet then sends back two terminators, the T-1000 and the TX, based on this information. Also, they send two T-101s to get future John, counting on his sentimentality. The two T-101s get caught (because John is not that sentimental). The first is reprogrammed by John and sent back to 1994 to save himself from the T-1000. The second T-101 breaks free briefly and kills John, so Kate has to finish its reprogramming and send it back to 2003. This assumes the future humans have some kind of EMP device that can incapacitate a T-101 at least temporarily without damaging it.
Also, it would have been nice to see John carrying the polaroid of his mother (from the end of the first movie) because he knows he’ll eventually have to give it to Reese, assuming Judgement Day happens.[/spoiler]
As for specific comments on the movie itself:
I found the whole “virus” think to be unlikely. Was Skynet sentient or not at that point? I was under the impression it created the virus in order to fool the humans into giving it complete control, at which point it nukes humanity, for reasons that escape me. T2 suggests that Skynet became sentient more gradually, and only triggered Judgement Day when the humans tried to shut it off (all movie computers have self-preservation instincts, it seems). This movie implied that Skynet was planning everything from the beginning.
I think it was said somewhere in the movie that the virus infected Skynet. I just think it’s stupid to keep up these spoiler boxes when 90% of the content in 90% of the posts is in spoiler boxes.
I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but T2 left open the possibility for a sequel. My dad noticed it in the theater.
After the T-1000 goes into the molten iron, Sarah and John destroy every remnant of the Terminators that have come from the future. They chuck the arm and chip from the one from T1 (that got smashed by the hydraulic press) into the molten metal. Then Arnie says he has to go in, too.
But remember when Arnie and the T-1000 were having a big battle in the foundry, and the T-1000 traps Arnie’s arm in some gears? We never see Sarah or John go back to get that arm and toss it in, too. So, assuming some Cyberdyne Systems guys (or some government dudes) get to the foundry pretty soon and recover it, they could’ve been pretty much back where they were before Sarah, John, and Dawson try to destroy everything.
Yeah, I hate spoiler boxes. SPOILERS TO FOLLOW
OK. The thing to remember here is that the ONLY way time travel can work is if there are multiple timelines. Arnold even makes a reference to “in THIS timeline” at some point, which implies that there are other timelines. If there could only be one timeline then any paradox will destroy its stability. When the terminator in T1 is sent back the timeline he lands in is different from the one he leaves. As soon as he effects even one particle the timelines must split and become seperate.
There is no ONE timeline that posesses the quality - let’s call it R - where R=Realness. They all exist at all points. Every possibility exists and always will. Every timeline=R. The machines can never alter their own timeline. They can only attempt to effect one of the trillions and trillions of other timelines. Before the Terminator in T2 was sent back it was in the same timeline as the end of T1. The Terminator’s sent back in T3 were in a different timeline from the ones in T2 (before they got sent back in time in T2). Tricky, I know.
Now, we CAN change fate is the message I got, but it will always have a price. The real kicker here is that the existence of John Connor in any timeline means that Judgement Day happens in the future of that timeline. Once they stop Judgment Day, a timeline without the existence of John Connor is the result. Somewhere, in some timeline (in billions of them probably), Judgment Day must have come and gone without a John Connor. perhaps Reese still existed and travels back in time to start the JC timelines.
I reallly dug the flick. The more I think about it, the more I like it. The philosophical message I got was that ALL POSSIBILITIES exist, and the best we can hope for is to change timelines. Fate isn’t some god controlling us, it is the result of all possible timelines existing. In fact some of the latest far out theories in physics suggest that the Multiverse is essentially all of possibility - and it may just exist. Perhaps infinite amounts of universes/timelines are all out there. Why do we exist? The answer may be that everything exists somewhere, and we are just one iteration. Given a long enough period, quantum theory suggests that if it is possible it will eventually happen somewhere. You can change timelines, but everything is going to happen somewhere anyway. In this way the answer is both: One’s fate can be changed from their perspective, but in the grand scheme we all have all fates somewhere.
Fun stuff. More later. . . .
dalovindj:
Why? Are you going out on a date?
Believe it or not, some physicists are proposing that this is exactly what’s happening in state-vector reduction ® in quantum physics. Particles continually go backwards in time as well as forward, self-interfering with themselves until the paradoxes cancel out, leaving only one “timeline” for the particle.