PopHorror Let's Get Scared
When it comes to action franchises, you can’t get much more well-known than The Terminator. Former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (Predator – 1987) took a role back in 1984 and helped it become one of the most iconic characters in cinema history. This month marks the 20th Anniversary of TERMINATOR 3: RISE OF THE MACHINES, the third movie in the franchise…..but why was there a third movie made? Who directed it? What happened? Let’s find out.
For the three of you that don’t know the history, here’s some backstory. In 1984, James Cameron (Aliens – 1986) wrote and directed (with help from William Wisher) the sci-fi action classic The Terminator. Starring Michael Biehn, Linda Hamilton, and Governor Arnold….it told the story of Kyle Reese (Biehn) trying to save a working-class girl named Sarah Connor (Hamilton) from a deadly cyborg known as The Terminator (Arnold).
A nuclear war wiped out the world and artificial intelligence known as Skynet developed by Cyberdyne Systems was responsible for it. The humans ended up winning the war, but not before Skynet in a last-ditch effort sent a human-looking infiltration unit (Arnold) called a terminator back in time to kill the leader of the resistance, John Connor, before he’s born by taking out his mother Sarah. Spoiler alert, Kyle dies protecting Sarah and she finishes off the Terminator to end the movie.
The flick was a smash success and seven years later, a sequel was in the works. James Cameron was back in the director’s chair with Wisher back as his co-writer. Set 13 years after the original movie ended, a new terminator known as the T-1000 has been dispatched by Skynet to take out John Connor as a teenage boy. Somehow old John Connor from the future got ahold of a T-800 model that looked exactly like the one sent back to kill his mother. Connor reprogrammed the T-800 to go back and protect young John (Ed Furlong – Detroit Rock City 1998). This movie would be called Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
Spoiler alert. Governor Arnold and young Connor break Sarah out of a mental hospital to take out Cyberdyne Systems & The T-1000 (Robert Patrick – From Dusk Till Dawn 2 1998) to prevent Judgment Day from ever happening……and that’s where we get our first paradox. If Skynet’s last ditch effort was to send The T-800 back to kill Sarah and the human resistance sent Kyle Reese back to stop it, then the second movie shouldn’t exist. Where did the T-1000 come from? Storyline plotholes aside, Terminator 2: Judgment Day was an even bigger smash than the original and is regarded as one of the greatest sequels in history. How do you top it? Well, they tried.
In 2003, for whatever reason Hollywood decided to bring Terminator back on the big screen. Previously there was a successful toy line in the wake of Terminator 2 along with a slew of video games. One of the best was Robocop vs Terminator which combined the two cyborg titans. Signs of trouble started when James Cameron would not be returning for Terminator 3. This time veteran director Jonathan Mostow (U-571 – 2000) would be in the chair.
What about the writer? No Wisher either…double uh-oh! The trio of Michael Ferris, Tedi Sarafian, and John Brancato cobbled together the script which would be called TERMINATOR 3: RISE OF THE MACHINES. The reason why Cameron bowed out was that he didn’t want to direct a script he didn’t write of characters he himself had created. Originally Eddie Furlong was going to reprise his role as John Connor but his real-life battle with drug addiction had Warner Brothers searching for a different actor. The first draft of the script turned off Linda Hamilton who apparently was supposed to be barely in it before being killed off. Just like that, almost everyone involved from T2 was gone except for Arnold.
In this caper, John Connor (Nick Stahl – Sin City 2005) is now a lonely drifter going from town to town looking for pills to numb his existence. He decides to rob a local veterinarian hospital but is thwarted and caught by his ex-girlfriend Kate Brewster (Claire Danes – Romeo & Juliet 1996). Suddenly the hospital is attacked by a new terminator, the powerful T-X (Kristanna Loken – BloodRayne 2005). T-X is taking out the leaders of the resistance while they were young and it just so happened Kate & John were next.
Have no fear, a T-800 (Governor Arnold) is here and he whisks Kate and John away. John demands an explanation and Arnold says Judgment Day wasn’t stopped, it was only postponed. It justttttttttt so happens that Kate’s father is Robert Brewster (David Andrews – Apollo 13 1995), the supervisor of a new AI anti-internet virus program….Skynet. That’s right, now the internet is going to bring Judgment Day. It’s now a race against time as Arnold, Kate, and John have to fight off T-X and stop Skynet from launching. That’s where things go south.
Terminator 2 was one of the most beloved sequels that couldn’t be topped, and TERMINATOR 3: RISE OF THE MACHINES didn’t even try. They took everything that was cool about the first two movies and made it silly. In the second movie, Arnold gets dropped outside a biker bar and intimidates the biggest one to get his badass-looking clothes. Here? He’s dropped outside a women’s bar and has to intimidate male strippers to get his leather outfit. Later in the movie, he tells a convenience store clerk to “Talk to the hand.”
While it is definitely funny, it’s not the same as the first two movies, but that’s actually a compliment to Arnold’s acting. In the first movie, he’s a relentless killer, in the second he’s a loveable protector, and this time he’s kind of in-between. The dynamic between John and T-800 was established in T2 as that one had a learning CPU in his program that allowed it to adapt to John’s style. The T-800 in the third movie was about as personable as a glass of water, but that was established as this was an entirely different T-800. They stripped away the charm of the second movie’s T-800 and added humor elements.
The only other guy to appear in all 3 movies was psychiatric doctor Dr. Silberman (Earl Boen – The Dentist 1996) who makes a cameo here for some laughs. It all added up to a good movie, but a let-down.
The acting was okay as Nick Stahl played a very downtrodden John Connor and Claire Danes was up to the task in her role. Kristanna Loken played a great cold-blooded killer but the underrated one was Arnold himself. Critics at the time denounced Arnold as having none of the charm he had in T2 but again, it’s an entirely different terminator. TERMINATOR 3: RISE OF THE MACHINES still managed to gross $433 million dollars and was the 7th highest-grossing film of 2003.
With almost no one involved from T2, it was expected to be a letdown. It was, but it was still damn good. 20 years later the legacy of it remains intact. There was a T3 video game for Gamecube and the role of T-X launched Kristanna Loken to star in the movie adaptation of the video game BloodRayne in 2005. Nick Stahl went on to play Yellow Bastard in the movie adaptation of the Frank Miller series Sin City. As for Arnold, I’ll let this picture tell the story.
Go out and watch T3 and try not to take it too seriously, after all, the people who wrote it didn’t.
