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Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
Directed by Jonathan Mostow
Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kristanna Loken, Nick Stahl, Claire Danes
Script: James Cameron & Gale Anne Hurd
Running Time: 2:10
Country: USA
Year: 2003
Official Site: Terminator 3
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A cult film anchored in collective memory, to this date The Terminator remains a pillar of science fiction, combining tense action scenes with a clever variation on the notion of space and time around the myth of the anti-hero. Gauged on the format of the Hollywood blockbuster Terminator 2, a disproportionate and sugary sequel, placed everything on spectacular visuals, relegating the engaging darkness for the benefit of entertainment in the first degree. If Terminator 3 preaches a return to B cinema, close to the original, Jonathan Mostow's film is pulled between two schools, that of a modest but resourceful cinema and that of a large production.
Close to a decade after the end of T2, the old emblematic model which carries Arnold Schwarzenegger's features is back to save, once more, the skin of John Connor (Nick Stahl), who's at the head of the hit list made by the ultramodern and glamorous T-X (Kristanna Loken).
Beneath its airs of pure entertainment, Terminator 3 is built on an amusing opposition between an obsolete world (technology in this case) and an uncontrolled and superficial progress. Whereas Terminator lands in the middle of nowhere, wears a used leather jacket and takes the wheel of an old pick-up truck, T-X, the too perfect icy beauty, bursts in on Rodeo Drive, wears orange leather and drives a flashy convertible. The confrontation between the two robots, a misleading battle of the sexes, thus symbolizes this fight of values, at the same time embodying the contrast between Terminator and Terminator 2—we are watching a film conscious of its cinematographic heritage. The picture even denounces the Internet, the most recent advancement, through the propagation of a virus, thus making us the victims of unrestrained progress which advances by trial and error. Terminator 3 is more human, equipped with a conscience—like Schwarzenegger's character—and with a sense of derision. Like the first opus, there is no true hero here. The majority of the protagonists knows his/her vulnerability and tries to resist it when they're not fleeing their destiny, starting with Connor.
With so many aspirations, one can only regret that a certain cacophony, on the level of the directing and scenario, reigns. The first part of film, featuring a succession of noisy action sequences, appears rather tedious, even more so given that the bravura scene, the chase through Los Angeles, is filmed in a not very spectacular and messy way which does nothing to erase the memory of the chases in T2 and Matrix Reloaded. If the screenwriters took care to develop certain dimensions of the narrative one will ask, however, about certain short cuts used to bring about action scenes more quickly. In Terminator 3's universe, it seems that a big menacing brute dressed all in leather has no problem penetrating the nerve center of a military base, and this despite a backpack filled with all sorts of weapons; the arrival in the presidential bunker is carried out with as much of softness, making the military guard pass for security at an Iraqi museum.
After some laborious beginnings, one must wait for the second part so that the film suddenly develops, as the scenario takes an unexpected pessimistic turn. One finds oneself in the blackness of a paranoid sci-fi B-movies of the Fifties, impressed with despair and unsubdued to the obedience of the Hollywood "happy ending". Against all expectation, Terminator 3 succeeds there where the remake of Planet of the Apes and the idiotic propaganda vehicle ID4: Independence Day failed; one has to get back to Abel Ferrara's Body Snatchers to find this sense of modernized paranoia.
Next to a Schwarzenegger who's again found the biting and wickedness of his beginnings, the casting confirms the independent color of the project. Nick Stahl, who proved himself in Larry Clark's (Bully) abrupt cinema, imposes as a loser, in the continuity of Edward Furlong's rebel, shouldered by Claire Daines as an annoying young woman, a reluctant heroine. Succeeding the skeletal and voluntarily unobtrusive Robert Patrick, Kristanna Loken plays on her offset femininity.
Curiously, the film's ample budget is not very visible onscreen, Terminator 3 never reaching the spectacular level of current productions; a third opus in half-tone which seems intended to start the series over again, making us impatiently wait for the two upcoming episodes. A blockbuster disguised as a B-movie, Mostow has made a strange work, a cinematographic hybrid soaked with melancholy.
Fred Thom
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