Terminator 3 Is A Derivative Disaster That Ended Up Being The Worst Movie In The Franchise

In the Terminator universe, the end of the world comes in the form of Judgement Day, the day when the machines took over, nuked the planet and sent humanity to near-extinction. But for the Terminator as a movie series, the end basically came when James Cameron left the directors chair and some producers decided to trot out the Terminator brand name for some easy bucks despite the fact that the entire Terminator plotline was obviously wrapped up in a tidy and satisfying bow at the end of the second Terminator movie. Screw concise storytelling though, we've got some pennies we still haven't wrung out of this dead horse!

The flimsy premise Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines decides is worth continuing the franchise for starts out as a Terminator 2 knock-off, where two rival machines from the future are sent into the modern day world, one, The Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) to protect John Connor and the other, the T-X (Kristanna Loken), being sent back in time to kill John Connor, with the only new storytelling wrinkle (which exists too briefly to impact the plot in a major way) being that the T-X is also killing all of the people who will eventually become John Connor's lieutenants in the war against the machines.

Chase scenes, robot fights and all that jazz ensue and it's all deathly boring in contrast to the gripping first two movies. John Connor has gone from being the precocious youngster of the second Terminator film to this dull blank slate who has a seriously contrived character arc (can we even call it that?) involving him coming to terms with his place as a general in the future. Similarly losing all of his personality from the last movie is the Terminator himself, who turns out to be a mostly superfluous individual in the context of the story simply because he doesn't have connect with the other characters in the movie in any profound way.

And then there's poor Claire Danes as a lady named Kate Brewster, who, in the future becomes John's wife. This movie might as well be titled Kate Brewster's Horrible, Awful, No Good, Very Bad Day considering Kate loses both her fiancee and father to the same evil killer lady robot in the span of, like, 12 hours. Don't expect those events to impact her in any way, she gets over 'em super quick and becomes a nice little reward for John to get at the end when he officially becomes the leader. Lovely. All of the characters in this film are basically paper-thin caricatures at best, with no entertaining one-liners or action beats for them to deliver to compensate for the startling lack of substance.

The various action sequences provided get themselves severely hindered by the fact that they all heavily utilize CGI from 2003 and there's none of the restraint used in their computer-generated effects, so you get a lot of cruddy looking CGI robots and effects throughout the movie that likely already looked distractingly fake in 2003. There's a car chase scene that's the only remotely interesting action set piecei n the movie since it's actually edited and choreographed well and even there the dire lack of any characters worth even remotely caring about kills all of the momentum before it even gets off the ground.

One just can't escape the pervasive lack of anything going on in not just the action sequences of Terminator 3 but basically any aspect of it. Unless the entire purpose of making this motion picture was to just get some robots that look like the Chopping Mall bots into the Terminator franchise, it't utterly failed. Terminator 3 doesn't expand the mythos in an interesting way, it's continuation of John Connor's character is laughably dismal, poor Claire Danes gets next to nothing to do, the directing and cinematography are as forgettable as they come, it's all just a big disaster so sweeping in its magnitude that not even a time traveling robot assassin could stop it. Congrats Terminator: Genisys, you're no longer the worst movie of this franchise.