A Closer Look At T-3: Rise Of The Machines
By James (surprisingly)

By the way, I'll assume you've seen the movie, because I'm going to do some major spoiling.

Anyway, I just got back from the movie, it's 3 am. While I reflect and tell you why T-3 was not good, keep in mind that I actually enjoyed the movie. Arnold is a comedian full stop.

The movie opens with a long, long and freaking long intro about how Connor now lives "off the grid" ie. no phone, no social security number, nothing. Everyone's really interested. Not. The movie then drivels along with the female Terminator (Terminatrix) killing a few people and being nude. I'm sure the movie would have been a lot cooler if it wasn't all censored.

We discover that the T-X has been sent back to kill the people who would in the future, become John Connor's Liutenants. They all happen to live within the same area as John does, which is cool for the T-X, and for the plot. Later we discover that a nuclear bomb is going to decimate the entire area, ignoring the fact that it would therefore be impossible for these people to escape it's blast radius and grow up into Connor's liutenants. Especially when we find that one of them has so much intellect that they work in a fast food place and the other is smoking a bong while his parents are out.

Anyway we'll ignore all that because Arnold's coming.

That's fuckin right. Arnold comes in, tosses Brewster (one of Connor's future liutenants, played by Clare Danes) in the back of a van and tells Connor to drive it to safety. He then proceeds to get bashed around by the T-X in a highway battle scene that is rivaled in length only by Jennifer Love Hewitt's face. It's pretty boring, but Arnold ends it in a cool way, and then the movie gets on track.

Somewhere along the way of this, we find out that a massive virus is taking over shit loads of computers and Skynet software is the only way to get rid of it.

While escaping, Connor clues Brewster in on the whole Terminator plot and Arnold cuts off the flesh on his chest because he's broken inside. Connor sees Arnold slice off his skin and is all like "Ewwwww", forgetting that in T-2, at the ripe age of 14 he sees Arnold slice of a large quantity of his forearm and is cool about it.

Arnold then takes the group to a cemetery, takes a shit load of guns from Connor's mother's coffin and then proceeds to own a load of cops. Just your general Arnold action for a while.

After approximately the 9 bazillionth chase in the Terminator trilogy, we find out that Brewster's dad is the one who has the power to stop Skynet, that the virus is Skynet and that they have to get to her Dad before he allows Skynet to have full power of the United States' defences. We also discover that Brewster is the one who programmed Arnold, that he obeys her every command. Apparently Arnold had a memory defect, since when she kept telling him to let her out of the truck he wouldn't, but now he does remember, and he will follow her commands.

Arnold and the rest reach Brewster's dad. Naturally, just after he passes over the power to Skynet, but there is still hope! Crystal Peak, the 'core' of Skynet. Brewster's dad gives them the codes and tells them to piss off. Fast.

Arnold fights off the T-X but inevitably gets beaten down, and then corrupted, so instead of killing Connor, shuts himself down.

Connor and Brewster fly themselves to Crystal Peak in a helicopter, and upon reaching there, the T-X shows up. Naturally. Then Arnold shows up saying; I'm back. Arnold lands his helicopter on her FACE, and then helps them get into the Crystal Peak mainframe and sacrifices himself to kill the T-X. However, upon reaching the apparent 'core', Connor and Brewster realise that it's not a core, it's a fall out shelter, that Arnold led them there so that they would survive and that Connor really is destined to be a leader.

It all would have been very thoughtful. If the obvious plot holes hadn't pissed me off already.

The first thing that was wrong with T-3 is its apparent lack of understanding of the plot, or its understanding of fate, and what you can do to change it. In movies like The Matrix, plot complexities are very well handled, because the script writers have a great understanding in cause and effect, however, in T-3 this was not the case;

In Terminator, John Connor sends a message back to his mom saying that "There is no fate but what we make". In T-3, Connor realises that there is no fate, that 'Judgement Day' is inevitable. Now, on a movie based, linear time-line this would be ok, but when we take into consideration the fact that what Connor knows in T-3, he will know in the future, and therefore know in T-1, it blows a massive hole in the plot.

Furthermore, if John Connor knows by the end of T-3 that this whole quest to Crystal Peak to stop Skynet is a wild goose chase, why would he or Brewster not send a message back to himself, so that he wouldn't have to get so disappointed and pissy at the end of the movie.

And furtherfurthermore, if when Arnold comes back in T-3, he knows that the nuclear war is going to start exactly 6:18 (?) pm and they have 3 hours to stop it, why not, say ummm come back earlier so that they actually have a realistic chance of stopping it?

Another case for arguement; the T-X and the T-1000 (Terminator 2). Why would the robots send back a T-X when the T-1000 was clearly a better model. Surely a liquid metal shell on an endo-skeleton is infinitely worse than pure liquid metal? And while we're on the point, why did the machines only send one Terminator? It seems rather obvious to me that (especially after learning from their mistakes in Terminators 1 and 2), they'd see the obvious advantages in sending multiple Terminators?

But what really killed T-3? Got to be the absence of the Terminator music, that "pyu mu mu, mu mu mu" you know it right?