My quick review: I thought T3 was a fairly so-so retread of T2 with a female terminator. The chick was hot but not that scary.
Here’s a question: Why don’t the future bots send a terminator back before the first movie instead of continuing to do it later. Send one when Sarah Connor is four…go back and kill her grandmother…why send to a time when the Connors are ready for it and know what it is?
Perhaps because they don’t where Sarah Connor’s parents are, etc.
Are we allowed to date now? When did that happen?
One thing that I think I’m misunderstanding:
MILD SPOILERS TO FOLLOW, NO BLACK BOX
The message, “no fate but that which we make for ourselves/the future is not set” is only actually presented in the second flick. It’s referred to as being in the message John sent back with Kyle, for his mother, but
(In one of the restored scenes from T2, Sarah has a medication induced hallucination of Kyle, but what he says is her invention, not the actual message he gave her. And John’s only got her word as to what was said.)
And yeah, it is just a movie and all, I guess.
I’m with NoGoodNamesLeft on the idea that the timeline(s) is(are) constantly in flux, so long as the time machine is running. Any changes made alter the details of the future, but not the big picture. The future is not set, but certain things are inevitable, anyway.
Well, for one thing his father never would have met his mother…
Diogenes the Cynic: My WAY is that the machines can’t change things too much, or they stand a good chance of writing themselves out of existence.
I saw T3 last night and really liked it. Not quite as good as the second one, which was not quite as good as the first one IMO. Still better than 98% of the dreck out there though.
Time travel movies are always fascinating to dissect. I’ve always been of the multiple timelines school of thought, because otherwise the whole idea of changing the past just doesn’t work. But then you run into other problems. For instance…
Just what is the Skynet of the future trying to accomplish by killing off John Conner in the past? Will John Conner in its present timeline just poof disappear? Will everything he accomplished just poof change to something else? Unless Skynet can send itself back into the past to experience the new timeline, it is still doomed in its present timeline.
I am also of the opinion that there must have been some “original” timeline where John Conner did not exist, and yet Reese still went back and fathered him in the past… maybe for a completely different reason. This created all of the alternate timelines where John Conner does exist.
I liked it, but maybe it is because I came in with low expectations.
Did anyone catch the tail number of the airplane in the air? The one on the ground was N30305C, I THINK the one in the air was different (ending in F), but am not sure…
Brian
Question:
Ok, John and what’s-her-face were supposed to get together when they kissed at 13. Or, rather, they did that in the original timeline.
The arrival of the terminators screwed that up, and they never got together.
Then “fate” put them together again at 18 (or whatever they were now) to correct for this.
Does this mean that the movie assumes that fate is some sort of intelligent power which manipulates events?
Magic time pixies?
That’s the impression I got, and that’s a pretty terrible way to write a movie. I mean, there’s a certain suspension of disbelief required in any time travel story, but as is presented, it seems like we have to believe an intelligent force is acting to manipulate the universe. And that just seems unnecesary.
I liked the fact that Arnie was back to really being a machine in the third one. T2 tried to make him too likable and too human, I think. In T3, he was acting more like what you’d expect a terminator to act like.
[/spoiler]
I agree with your spoiler box SenorBeef, but I disagree on the Arnold acting more like a machine in T3 than T2. In T3, he tried to be too humerous…the most blatent scene is when he grabs the sunglasses from the gay stripper and puts them on, then takes them off. While it was hilarious, I seriously doubt a Terminator would act that way. In T2, Arnold learned human behavior by being around humans, hence his human like behavior.
That’s your opinion, SenorBeef, and does not make the script suck. Some people believe that you can’t avoid fate, while others believe that you can change it. It’s like saying me saying all religious movies suck because I’m an agnostic.
What makes him a gay stripper? I mean maybe he gave the impression of acting fruity, but it was women’s night.
I meant, he was a stripper who was gay( not a stripper for gays) hence the sunglasses and his acting. I don’t know what the big deal is as I did not intend for it to be offensive.
I’d just like to bring up something I thought I noticed…in the gas station, when Arnie is “shopping,” he seems to grap a few “items” out of a pink-cardboard display box…which looked like it had the word “Women’s…” written on the side.
It might just have been a box of “Wrigley’s” gum, but I think Arnie was shoplifting tampons. For Kate, one would presume.
And did anyone notice…at the end, when John and Kate are in the Colossus bunker—er, “Crystal Peak,” John asks “Why didn’t he tell us that this was just a bunker?” (Or words to that effect), and Kate replies “It was his mission…to protect us.” They really could be talking about Arnie, OR Kate’s father, who had given them the entry codes to the bunker? It kind of melds nicely with John line to Arnie, “You were the closest thing I ever had to a father.”
Another thought…since the “rise of Skynet” and Judgement Day that occur in T3 are, essentially, the results of an alternate timeline created by the events of T2, Arnie’s Terminator might indeed be the same Terminator unit that was sent to protect John in T2. It’s far-fetched, but possible. Think about it: Say I, Joe Blow, am born in 1983. In 2003, I go back in time to 1963 to stop Kennedy from being assassinated. I succeed, but get killed in the process. The timeline is changed, so that there’s no reason for me to time travel back to 1963. But I’m not erased from history…I’m still born in 1983. And the “me” that’s born in the new alternate timeline could, theoretically, still use the time machine in 2003, travel back to 1964, and visit the grave of the version of myself who came from the original-timeline 2003, and who died saving Kennedy.
Pretty wild, eh? But not much more convoluted than your average Star Trek time travel episode.
This might explain why Skynet didn’t send a T-X back to kill John in T2…in the original timeline, Skynet might not have even invented a T-X.
And…it’s a pet peeve, but couldn’t the filmmakers have gone with a different aircraft than a Cessna?
I mean, it’s a nice aircraft and all, but seeing as this was a Sci-Fi/Action movie, couldn’t they have used a more, well futuristic aircraft, without really stretching the audience’s suspension of disbelief? Planes like the Diamond Eclipse*, or the [url=http://members.eaa.org/home/homebuilders/selecting/kits/Maverick%20TwinJet%201500.html]Maverick Twinjet are available to the general public in the present day, and surely would be within the budget of a high-ranking Air Force officer like Kate’s dad.
Just got back from watching it. I agree the spoiler boxes are getting ridiculous so, SPOILERS BELOW:
Regarding Arnie killing John in the future:
My understanding is that Arnie said they selected the T-800, an obsolete model, because they thought John would feel an emotional attachment to it. I gather that all T-800s look like Arnie. I think Arnie wasn’t explaining why they made the T-800 look a certain way – they all look the same – but rather, he’s explaining why they didn’t pick a more advanced unit for the assasination job.
Note that they didn’t say that the “emotional attachment” angle WORKED, only that Skynet basically thought it would give their assassin an advantage. It might be that John didn’t feel a wisp of emotional attachment (especially given that he now knows the unit is out for his head), made every effort to keep the assassin unit away, and the assassin just succeeded in its mission anyway.
Actually, Arnie said they picked a T-101 (Argh. It’s supposed to be a T-800 series, model 101. His “class” of terminators, with living tissue on the robot skeleton, is the T-800 series. His specific model, what he looks like, etc, is 101. This makes sense, but they can’t get it straight in the movies).
There were lots of different T-800s as far as different faces and such went. They picked the T-800, model 101 because it looked like Arnie.
I don’t mind spoiler boxes myself. They let me know that the contents of the box are relavent, for one. I like that. But I guess people now don’t want them and anyone that has read this far has probably already seen the movie, and I’ll give some spoiler space.
SPOILER SPACE
Some more problems.
HOW THE #%@# DID ARNIE RUN OVER THE TX WITHOUT KILLING CLAIRE DANES??? I know he’s a robot, but come on! Suspension of disbelief only goes so far.
Actually this doesn’t bother me so much, but…
The main problem I saw was that T3 completely invalidated T2. In T2 they tried to destroy all of the technology to keep skynet from being created. But future John Conner knew when he met his wife. And he knew that his wife’s dad was the chump that, well, basically destroyed most of mankind. So instead of going after the technology left behind in T1, why didn’t he just get in good with his father in law, and convince him not to use skynet to wipe out the virus?
Of course all of this was on my mind until I realized the true paradox of this series: John Conner cannot exist without Skynet.
But wait! I have to disagree. All they really need is to build a time machine. If John Conner prevented doomsday and then invented the time machine, he could send his best buddy to the past to meet his Mother. No skynet, but yes time machine. Kind of invalidates T1 though.
Saw the movie last night. Great fun. I don’t think I liked it as much as the first two, but it was better than I expected. Far better.
Mrs enipla really, liked it too.
I had heard that there is a stunt that almost got pulled because it was too expensive, but Arnold liked it so much he paid for it him self.
Anyone else hear this?
Yeah, I heard that on The Tonight Show.
I think it was the scene where Arnie goes through the buildings while holding onto the crane.
Touching on whether Connor would have been fooled by the Terminator just because he looks like Arnold - he didn’t have to believe the Terminator was the same one from his childhood. He just had to question its motives for a split-second. Recall the beginning of T3:
JC: “Are you here to kill me?”
T: “…No. My mission is to protect the lives of John Connor and his deputies.”
Connor shouldn’t have bothered to ask. That moment’s hesitation is probably what got his future self killed.
That said, the throwaway line about the Arnold-style Terminators coming off an assembly line could lead to a really cool scene in the next movie: a version of Matrix2’s Neo-Fights-100-Agent-Smiths scene with Connor going up against an endless line of Terminators. 
It just occurred to me that there’s no reason to keep having these Terminators show up naked. In the first movie, we were told that only living tissue, or something surrounded by living tissue, could pass through the time displacement process. So Kyle Reese arrives naked, and the Terminator (metal robot covered with living flesh) arrives naked. Fine.
But then in T2, that apparently goes out the window, because the advanced Terminator that arrives isn’t biological at all, but is made of infinitely malleable liquid metal. So apparently the “living tissue” rule is gone, and there’s no reason for the second Arnie to arrive naked, and no reason for the liquid metal terminator to have the appearance of a naked human instead of a clothed one (since he didn’t even need clothes, being able to change his appearance to include any kind of clothing needed).
Same for T3.
For that matter, if I wanted to make Terminators as infiltration units, they wouldn’t look like bodybuilders or hot chicks; they’d look as average as possible.