Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
With Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nick Stahl, Claire Danes, and Kristanna Loken.
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I don’t know whether Judgment Day is inevitable, but after the movie grossed $500 million worldwide, Terminator 3 probably was. James Cameron, who wrote and directed the first two episodes, was planning to script and produce it but pulled out after losing control of the rights. Actress Linda Hamilton, whose Sarah Connor metamorphosed from a mousy waitress in the first movie to a hardened, joyless guerrilla in the second, opted out as well, thus retiring the franchise’s most interesting character. And Edward Furlong, who was plucked off a Pasadena street corner to play John Connor in T2 and has since gone on to a fairly respectable acting career, has been replaced by Stahl. Other than makeup wizard Stan Winston, the only major player still involved is Schwarzenegger–but the producers no doubt concluded that he’s the only one they needed.
If there is such a thing as destiny, Schwarzenegger surely found his the day he was cast as the Terminator: the role made him a superstar, and nearly two decades later he’s still completely identified with it. “No matter where I go in the world,” he says in the film’s press book, “no matter what movie I have promoted over the last twelve years, people always ask me, ‘When are you going to do another Terminator? You’ve got to do another Terminator. Please, Arnold, do another Terminator.’” (If he was promoting duds like The Last Action Hero, Jingle All the Way, or The Sixth Day, then another Terminator must have seemed like a good idea.) Although he’s still a remarkable physical specimen at 56, the Austrian oak isn’t getting any younger; the cyborgs he plays in The Terminator, Judgment Day, and Rise of the Machines are supposedly duplicate models, but the living tissue stretched over their steel endoskeletons seems a little looser with each movie. If he’s going to see the role through to the end, the time is now.
Of course a sizable quotient of the movie’s target audience just wants to see stuff destroyed, and in that regard Rise of the Machines won’t disappoint. The big set piece in T2 is the bombing of a steel-and-glass office complex that houses the nefarious Cyberdyne Systems Corporation, whose computerized missile-defense system, Skynet, is destined to trigger the nuclear holocaust and initiate the takeover of the planet. Rise of the Machines, which reportedly cost $178 million, features a hair-raising chase in which the Terminatrix pursues John Connor in a truck carrying a 100-ton crane, at one point swinging its arm out at a 90-degree angle so that it rakes through the glass facade of an office building. James Cameron–whom critic Richard Corliss once called “the high priest of Hollywood bloat”–couldn’t have done it bigger. The Terminator, which cost a measly $6.4 million, had a much more interesting story, in which a hapless nobody had to come to terms with the responsibility of being the most important person on the planet.
