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Kate Brewster (Claire Danes) [Being held captive in the back of a truck]: Drop dead, asshole!
T-101 (Arnold Schwarzenegger): I am unable to comply. [Closes the shutter]
Ha-HAH!
I made a bit too much noise in the theater when I heard this. I made as much noise as I did when, just a middle-school student, I heard Arnold Schwarzenegger's badass robot in 1991's Terminator 2: Judgment Day ask the middle-schooler John Connor why he shouldn't kill people. John Connor says, "Because it's bad!" The Terminator asks, again, "Why?" That's when I laughed -- at the second "Why?"
Kids laugh at one-word jokes, to be sure; they find brainless repetition funny, or even enthralling. So it was that the young me laughed and laughed like a dumb little kid when Arnold Schwarzenegger kept asking "Why?"
"Why?" "Why?" "Why?"
T2 was hyped, in some circles, as starring a kinder, gentler Terminator. The Terminator, being a killing machine sent from the future, can't get too much kinder or gentler before he starts to get boring. In 1984's The Terminator, Arnold's Terminator was a crazed killer of anything that brandished a gun in opposition to him -- and even several innocent women.
The women were all named "Sarah Connor." In the early 1980s, even director James Cameron wasn't visionary enough to foresee advances in wireless networking that any self-respecting cyborg from the mid-twenty-first century should no doubt be equipped with. T2's liquid-metal T-1000 was a little more resourceful, carrying around a photograph, asking questions. Hell, he was even dressed like a police officer. The T-1000 had something that the T-101 did not -- personality. He still didn't have the internet in him.
That's because T2 was made in 1991, back when the Internet was still capitalized, and still very much of a fantasy. Cyberspace was for William Gibson novels, not movies that aimed to represent precisely how the end of the world might look, if the technology causing it existed in 1991.
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machine's T-X, played by Kristanna Loken, who would strike me as a snakewoman even without her reptilian red-leather suit, is fully wireless. A product of the science-fiction writers of 2003, she materializes in a Beverly Hills clothing boutique equipped with nanomachines that can infect any computer system at the touch of a finger. A combination of Arnold's T-101 and Robert Patrick's T-1000, the T-X consists of a metal endoskeleton with movable liquid-metal skin. The endoskeleton allows the T-X to, if nothing else we haven't seen before, change her right arm into a plasma-pulse-cannon or a flamethrower, and that's just too damned cool, though maybe not as cool as the T-1000's shapeshifting was for a twelve-year-old in 1991.
Wireless-equipped, the T-X is able to find every member of her hit-list without stopping for directions. This eliminates the need for her to say much of anything. We see her kill a few times, with icy, reptilian precision, until she stumbles upon John Connor, who she wasn't even sent to kill in the first place.
Since the brain-wrenching events of T2, John Connor has gone on a self-imposed exile. In running away from his destiny to become leader of the resistance against The Machines, he signs no documents, he holds no identification, he travels by motorcycle or by hitchhiking, he drinks Budweiser, and he becomes a hardened young man, all without leaving the Greater Los Angeles area.
On the Fateful Night the film begins, he's wounded from a fall off his bike, and dopes himself up on dog painkillers at an animal hospital. This is where he runs into Kate Brewster, who he once made out with in a friends basement at age thirteen. Quite a serendipitous evening.
It turns out more serendipitous, as the T-X and the T-101 collide on the scene. Kidnapped for her own protection, Kate is unknowingly confined in the back of the truck John Connor uses to escape.
This is the thirty-one-minute mark of the movie. I looked at my watch for the last time at this point. At this point, nothing had really struck me as too bold. I'd laughed when Arnold's T-101 stopped by a biker bar, naked, on what happened to be Ladies Night. I smirked at the cleverness of his receiving his outfit mostly nonviolently -- from a male stripper. Nothing else impressed me.
Until thirty-two minutes in, when the First Big Action Scene begins: the T-X, piloting a massive crane-truck, hunts down John Connor's vehicle, assisted by several driverless police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks -- see, she's remote-controlling them, with her nanomachines.
T-101 boosts a police chopper (not a bike), and busts onto the scene. Metal screams, things blow up, sparks fly, and a kiddy pool gets knocked up into the air. The T-101 hangs onto the crane as it tears through telephone poles and slams through multiple large objects. In the end, he manages to gain control of John Connor's vehicle, and they find safety.
While this scene impresses me, it's mostly on technical levels. I marveled all throughout this first big, elaborate action set-piece, at how well-put together it all is. The camera angles are optimal. The explosions are convincing, even if computer-animated. Kate's screaming from the back of the truck -- "I have a fiancé! He'll be looking for me!" -- injects the right amount of human terror into the situation at hand.
Is it enough, though? Is it enough humanity? Well, not quite.
T2's first Big Action Scene begins in an arcade at a shopping mall. Young John Connor and his friend knock over an ATM for some cash, and then hit the games. In that arcade, John's friend has the displeasure of meeting the T-1000, who's poking his nose around, showing John's picture. When the Terminator shows up to square off against the T-1000, there are plenty of shocked and screaming people. The T-101's shotgun is stored away in a box containing a bouquet of roses. Several passersby become casualties.
We get close to this humanity in Terminator 3, when we see the T-101 carrying a Gatling gun in his right hand and a coffin full of weapons on his left shoulder. He's shooting at parked police cars with that steely look on his face. The cars explode, and his heads-up display tells him: "Human casualties: 0." The police officers then jump up from behind the surviving cars; one of them screams "Keep shooting!" And they do.
After the following scene at a gas station, the rest of Terminator 3 takes place entirely away from Innocent Humanity. It takes place on long stretches of highway in the Mojave Desert. It takes place in a Recreational Vehicle being driven by Arnold Schwarzenegger, or in the hallways of a military installation, or in the air, or in a secret mountain fortress. The only bystanders who get slaughtered by the "Terminatrix" happen to be the very inventors of SkyNet -- the root of the Inherently Evil Military Technology.
This is a plague for modern sci-fi or fantasy film sequels that feature "Two worlds;" The Matrix is at its most captivating when Neo's being-chewed-out-by-his-boss scene turns into science fiction chase-scene through an office building that questions reality. Once that reality is revealed, the movie deals with issues of coming to accept destiny, responsibility, and kung fu; the jarring of the revelation of the reality has a momentum that carries us excitedly through the movie. The Matrix Reloaded takes place in a world populated entirely with people who know what the hell is going on. As such, the human anger of the man who had his cell-phone stolen in The Matrix is absent, and we're served with an action picture in which most of the "normal" human characters are driving cars during the ultimate highway chase sequence.
In a not-too-dissimilar way, Blade served its delighted audience with a story of a vampire defending a human woman from a vampire underground. There's a great scene in the woman's apartment where a police officer offering protection is revealed as a familiar (a human servant of the vampires). There's an even greater scene later, when the villain, a pure vampire, meets the half-vampire Blade in a park populated with people. Covered in thick white sunblocking makeup, the evil vampire -- Frost -- holds a little girl hostage. Blade 2 takes place almost entirely at night; every cast member plays a vampire. The story is about one vampiric underworld killing another vampiric underworld. The whole thing is -- while entertaining -- an exercise in vampire jargon. When romantic sparks fly, they're sparks of the vampire-on-vampire variety.
When non-central characters in Terminator 3 die, they're non-central characters of the Evil Military Technologist variety.
Are not the most thrilling moments of videogames like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City when our car chase sequence takes us onto a heavily-populated beach? Was not the Sega Genesis Terminator 2: The Videogame thrilling only in the shopping mall level, where we were free to shoot any innocent person, then jump from the fourth floor into a fountain on the ground level, then escape the police by hiding in the parking garage?
Where's the "Big Humanity" in Terminator 3?
It's . . . there. It's just not as easy to see as you might think. It's hidden behind all the jargon.
This sci-fi jargon feel is a handicap, to be sure; despite it, the movie performs well enough to be dubbed "good science-fiction." If this good science-fiction is made a little worse by the paradoxy nature of the plot, it's made better by some cracking dialogue moments during the exposition and character development phases of its precision-engineered screenplay.
The semi-road-trip contained within the movie's plot features plenty of story exposition, as both the kind, gentle Terminator and the I-don't-want-to-grow-up-to-lead-a-revolution John Connor briefly summarize the events of the first two movies for Kate's digestion and the digestion of any newcomers in the audience. Even for a fan of the original movies, the exposition is entertaining. To wit:
John Connor (Nick Stahl) [To the T-101]: Tell her who I am.
T-101: He is John Connor, who will lead the human race to salvation.
Kate [Motioning to T-101]: And who's he?
John: He's a robot, from the future.
Ha-HAH AGAIN!
It is a credit to Nick Stahl's (In the Bedroom) desperate-yet-strong performance as Connor that the seriousness of such a line -- it is the truth, after all -- turns the expository moment into one of almost-movie-magic.
The character development, which takes place on board the RV, also approaches this level of almost-greatness.
Kate [sitting with John at the RV's dinner table]: You know, that was the first time I ever kissed a guy.
John [sticking wires into blocks of C4]: Really?
[awkward little smiling silence]
T-101 [from the driver's seat]: Your levity is good. It relaxes you. It eases your fear of death.
OH MAN, THAT'S RICH!
You put three or four dialogues like that into a movie, and it doesn't even matter how much robot carnage is stuffed into the finale: someone in Hollywood has already made me happy, and that's good enough.
Those people in Hollywood keep making me happy as the movie rolls out Wacky Robotic Invention after Wacky Robotic Invention. The T-1s -- real robots constructed by real robot-constructers, according to a documentary my mother says she saw the other day -- are something I really, truly needed to see. They are big, burly, wide-shouldered brushed-steel mecha-killers with tank treads for feet. Not unlike Robocop's ED-209, these robots are big, messy, and impersonal. They are also the first in the soon-to-be long line of Terminators; their heads are wide and menacing; their eyes glow red not unlike Arnold's once he gets a little skin burnt off.
The T-1s are recognizable as the origins of the Terminator line. There is no long-winded exposition, no Experienced Scientist telling Inexperienced Scientist about the philosophies behind the creation of the robot, or the alignment of its tank treads. Rather than tell us what the T-1s are, T3 shows us. It shows us, and clearly, the model-number "T-1" stenciled on the front of each unit; after being told many times that Arnold is a T-101 and the T-X is a T-X (bonus points for fans of T2, who know of the T-1000), being shown this unit's model number shows us a whole lot.
The film then shows these machines murdering hundreds of bystanders.
Then it shows the T-101 tearing a T-1's head off with the effort of a microwave heating up a burrito. It was during this scene -- in which Arnold drops down out of the ceiling and tears the robot's head off -- that I came to understand Terminator 3 as a movie: it is, as the title says, about the Rise of the Machines. This movie is a machine, not a human. It is efficient and clean, and very well-made. It does its job. It moves slickly toward an ending that made me clap my hands with surprise. Just as "Basic psychology" is among the T-101's programs, this movie's programmers -- uh, writers -- follow the formula of the predecessors well enough to set a levity-filled first-kiss-in-a-make-out-basement confession during one character's construction of a C4 bomb, during a road-trip toward destiny in a recreational vehicle being driven by the big-name-actor who delivers the scene's punchline.
This humor is as calculated in its refreshment as John Connor's confession that the T-101 was "the closest thing to a father-figure I've ever had" is scientific in its being good fiction. That the latter scene is punchlined with a robotic, "You are referring to my predecessor" is one thing; that this all comes to a sharp, suspenseful point when the T-101 is reprogrammed to do evil is a deliciously different something else.
I mentioned above how the T-101 retrieves his clothing from a male stripper. Well, I didn't mention what happens when he puts on the stripper's sunglasses; that little gem of a moment is a well-oiled visual punchline, one that you can appreciate if you never saw T2, yet one that is deepened if you've seen both The Terminator and T2.
The mechanical manner of dealing with all mentions of Linda Hamilton's "Sarah Connor" character leaves little guesswork for new audience members: the woman was some kind of techno-Bohemian loon.
The T-X's first line is an energy-efficient process that shows a small triumph of telling over showing:
T-X: I like your car.
I don't even need to say who she says that to, or what happens next. You can probably figure it out. That's what makes it so effective.
You probably can't figure out what the T-X does right before being questioned by a police officer for speeding. I'll give you a hint: she looks up at a billboard showing a model in lingerie, and then takes advantage of her liquid-metal skin in a way that stuns the officer when he asks her if she has any idea how fast she was going. She replies:
T-X: I like your gun.
Ooh, she's manipulative.
We don't need to hear her say much else. We already know what she stands for. We know her role. We know the schtick. We get the idea.
A little piece of telling a little later in the movie goes a long way:
John Connor: We'll find a way to destroy her.
T-101: Unlikely. I am an obsolete model.
Yet the movie never shows us this. To Arnold's credit, he's never looked better. He's bragged in interviews that he's in the best shape of his life, and I'd believe it after seeing Terminator 3. He's buff, and rough, and maybe that's what makes the T-X look like a floozy. Or maybe it's the point the director wanted to make?
Either way, when the T-X and the T-101 square off in what would be, in a lesser movie, the main plot-point-slash-fist-battle, they looked pretty damned evenly matched to me. Then the T-X goes and gets dirty with her technological superiority. Yet . . . even when revealing her true strength, she doesn't reveal anything truly spectacular.
As I have said above, the T-X is a metal endoskeleton with liquid-metal shapeshifting skin and a morphing gun-arm. She is unique because . . . because . . .
I don't know.
In the original Terminator, Arnold was unique because he was bigger and scarier than any "human" villain we'd ever seen on a movie screen. He withstood multiple gunshot wounds. When his endoskeleton was revealed, the five-year-old me was mostly terrified. Add this to the fact that his only opponent is a regular man, also sent from the future, and you get plenty of cleverness.
T2 upped the ante in a serious way. Where The Terminator was a thriller, T2 became a hardcore science-fiction-action picture. The sci-fi, which built on the little loopy paradox of The Terminator -- a robot sent from the future to kill a woman who will give birth to a resistance leader whose father is the very soldier sent from the future to destroy the robot -- got wild and wacky and even out of hand. It involved and justified gunfights in shopping malls and a scene in which a woman vilely curses out her crooked psychiatrist at a mental hospital. It also stars one of the baddest bad guys the world had ever seen.
The badassness of the T-1000's liquid-metal body took only one shotgun-blast-from-Arnold to be revealed. We knew, then: this guy means business. Hell, we knew he meant business when he formed a blade with his arm and impaled John Connor's foster parents.
What, then, does the T-X mean?
However efficient she is as a killing machine, she's also a pretty efficient analogy: if the first Terminator was revealed in all his awesome glory when we first saw his endoskeleton, and T2's T-1000 was awesome for his liquid-metal body, the T-X is, by rights, awesome because she combines both the endoskeleton and the liquid-metal.
This is how sequels work, today. If it's a "2," add something new. If it's a "3," combine what made "1" and "2" successful. Terminator 3's virtue is that it is, shot-for-shot, action sequence-for-action sequence, a well-made, superiorly put-together, classy science-fiction-action picture about man vs. machine that's more fulfilling than The Matrix Reloaded.
Just before the fair, small, good "surprise" ending, when I see the T-X on her last legs, screaming demonically at her captors, missing a few limbs, it's the simple roundness of her knee-joints that strikes me as the most memorable image from Terminator 3. It's the click-click manner with which she detaches her shins from her knees that finally, in the very, very end, makes me look at her and think: however lacking in inspiration or design gimmicks, she sure as hell was one well-made machine.
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--tim rogers is actually a T-R sent from the future to review videogames
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