"T3" or not "T3?"

Noel Vera

"Terminator 2" (or "T2" as people liked to call it) was a step up
the ladder of Cameron's monumental megalomania. It was his biggest-
budgeted picture at that time, and at that time the biggest budgeted
movie ever made; it was a pioneer in computer-generated (CGI)
effects, a big boxoffice hit, and a final realization of the ideas
Cameron (according to scriptwriter Daniel Gilbertson) "borrowed"
from science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick's short stories "Second
Variety" and "Jon's World" (it's true Harlan Ellison, who found
similarities between "The Terminator" and his stories, sued
successfully to put his name in the credits, and Dick didn't…but
then 1) Cameron probably took from more than one source, and 2) Dick
died two years before "The Terminator" came out).

I don't know why it took over ten years to make the third
installment…only Cameron apparently feels making these movies is now
beneath him (he's an Oscar winner, dammit!), so the producers have
instead given the reins (and a comparatively reduced budget) to
Jonathan Mostow, an efficient, effective action filmmaker ("U-
571," "Breakdown"). A smaller production, a lesser-known director,
an aging Arnold Schwarzenegger whose blockbuster bloom is gone (and
who may soon be running for office)--the picture looks like a
leaner, hungrier "Terminator," overall.

It helps that Nick Stahl plays John Connor, the hero around whom
this whole thing revolves. Stahl looks grimier and less certain than
his predecessor Edward Furlong (who couldn't play John Connor due
reportedly to addiction problems), and he has darker, more haunted-
looking eyes than the usual action hero (Keanu Reeves, Tom Cruise,
Vin Diesel to name a few); his character is written like an action
hero gone to seed--after all, in "T2" the assumption was that the
future in which Connor plays a crucial part never happens, and
Connor, it's implied, remains the juvenile delinquent that he was at
the beginning of that film. In "T3" he has, if anything, become
seedier and even more delinquent, living "off the net" as he puts it-
-no permanent address, no phone number, no way for the machines he
supposedly destroyed to trace him. For someone who irrevocably
changed the future, he seems to have very little faith in what he's
done.

His mistrust is justified, as it turns out; a new Terminator, the
TX, has come to kill--not him, being untraceable--but his
lieutenants; Schwarzenegger also comes back (reprogrammed, as
in "T2") to protect him. Schwarzenegger explains that the TX--
called "Terminatrix," for long--is the latest version, designed to
target even "cybernetic organisms" like him, a "Terminator for
Terminators."

And it goes on, over and over again in a never-ending chase.
Schwarzenegger doesn't try emoting too much, or attempting subtle
drama: when in one scene he's asked to fight himself (having been
reprogrammed to kill Connor), he takes it out on the hood of a
vehicle (the vehicle is totaled, of course). This is no time for Ah-
nold to try stretch his "thespian abilities"--he has to get back to
his meat-and-potato roots, to the slam-bang-sorry-ma'am style of
action he started his career out with. Seeing Schwarzenegger, at his
age, doing this--not so much regressing as simplifying, purifying
himself--is actually rather poignant (it's far more poignant than
the unintentionally hilarious Christmas massacre scene he had to do
in "End of Days").

As one of Connor's "lieutenants," Clair Danes is a welcome presence
to the franchise. Linda Hamilton in "T2" was buffed beyond belief--
Cameron had a thing for strong-willed, physically fit women--but
Danes harkens back to Hamilton in the original film, to someone
softer, more down-to-earth, with suggestions of the steel to come.
As the Terminatrix Kristanna Loken puts the classic supermodel
impassiveness to good use--we've always suspected these ramp
goddesses of being heartless automatons, and Loken plays into the
joke nicely. I remember one critic complaining about "T2" that we're
asked to believe in Schwarzenegger as the underdog; "T2" has many
flaws (ponderous and overproduced, for starters) but I thought the
critic had overlooked an obvious trend in high technology: that
newer models are slimmer, sleeker, sexier; Schwarzenegger, put
beside this deadlier version, looks lumberingly obsolete.

Director Mostow takes his cue from Schwarzenegger's performance (or
is it the other way around?): this is plain, no-nonsense action
filmmaking, admirably coherent, with little of the MTV-style tics
(millisecond cuts to the rock beat; strobe lighting; beams cutting
through gas or mist) that you see in newer filmmakers. And none of
that "bullet time" slow motion nonsense; Mostow relies on the old-
fashioned principle that audiences are most excited when they know
exactly what's going on--a principle so little used today it almost
seems revolutionary.

The original "Terminator" was groundbreaking too, in its way.
Cameron, armed with the idea that a robot killer made to look human
has only one purpose, infiltration (this fudging of identity between
man and machine being a basic Dickian theme), made perhaps the
leanest, meanest science fiction thriller of them all, and to my
mind the best adaptation of Philip Dick's pulp-philosophical
sensibility to date (that he did it without the author's permission
is ironically typical--you won't believe the number of movies lifted
from Dick's books, one way or another).

And because Cameron didn't have the budget, and special effects and
computers at the time didn't have the capability, he had to do most
of the stunts and action sequences on-camera, practically for real
(in the scene where Schwarzenegger punches through a windshield
Cameron uses a real windshield that's actually smashed). Cameron
left the "let's do it as close to real as possible" neighborhood as
soon as he could get the budget, and went on to pioneer CGI effects
in films like "T2" onwards--which aren't necessarily an improvement;
the stunts have simultaneously grown more fantastic and less
credible. "T3" hews closer to the spirit of Cameron's
first "Terminator," but with (unfortunately, I think) a still
liberal amount of CGI effects; the chase sequences do show wit and
imagination, more than the far more expensive "Matrix Reloaded"--
there's something appealing about all those construction trucks and
emergency vehicles making mayhem in the streets. In a summer of
overblown superproductions like the "X-Men" sequel, the
aforementioned "Matrix" sequel, and the overhyped "Hulk" movie, this
picture hugs the road tight and zips past them, a stripped-down
roadster with nothing more on its mind than victory.

(First printed in Businessworld, July 11, 2003)

(Comments? Email them to noelbotevera@...)