In the first film from this very profitable franchise, The Terminator (1984), the rogue defense system, Skynet, sends the Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a cyborg organism, to destroy Sarah Connor even before she gives birth to John. John is to be the future leader of the resistance to Skynet’s machines. (Skynet is the evil and alien self aware computer defense system built by humans but now battling its creators.) Sarah is saved by Reese, who was sent back from the future to save her. They sleep together, before he is killed defending her from the Terminator. John is born nine months later.
In Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), the Terminator returns to save John, now 12, and his mother from Skynet’s machines and prevent Judgment Day, a violent, cataclysmic event that will destroy the human race.
In the Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, John Connor (Nick Stahl) is in his 20s and his mother has died. Though Judgment Day was supposedly thwarted through the combined efforts of Sarah, young John and the Terminator, John lives “off the grid” so no one can find him and rides his motorcycle from town to town. He carries the weight of the future on his shoulders.
Then, in what seems like a coincidence, John meets an old friend from junior high, Kate Brewster (Claire Danes).
Now Skynet sends T-X (a Terminatrix, played by Kristanna Loken) to destroy John and anyone who will be associated with him in the future including Kate. The Terminator (still played by Schwarzenegger), an outdated model, reappears again this time sent from the future by the leader of the human resistance to Skynet and its machines and it’s not John.
But the script for Terminator 3 suffers from too many writers trying too hard to make sense out of another convoluted storyline. Sci-fi action and special effects cannot make up for the lack of coherent writing and a weak plot. Besides, the only character in the story with a moral dilemma is a cyborg.
Rather than ideas per se, Terminator 3 focuses on images of the American flag (as did Legally Blonde 2), the irrelevance of the police, invasion by aliens (the machines invented by American humans), and woman as devil and savior. The destruction of the world (Judgment Day), John realizes, is inevitable. But we (Americans) are meant to survive. There may be more in this excessively violent film to talk about than meets the Terminator’s eyeball.
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