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T3: Rise of the Machines

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Saw this with Toad at the Studio Movie Grill.  Had chicken nachos and chicken fingers.

First off, the terminator chick was hot (sorry, but I am, after all, mostly human.)   Didn't get to see her really nude, unfortunately.  Claire Danes is awfully cute, too.

They had fun with some of the Terminator staples.  Arnold getting clothes, choosing sunglasses, a twist on "I'll be back."  Similarly, where the T1000 in T2 said to the motorcycle cop, "Nice bike," this new chick a coupla times said, "I like your (whatever)" just before killing the hapless victim and taking it.  Luckily, they worked these into the story well enough that they weren't too jarring.  They actually did fit in-context, albeit just slightly heavy-handed.

They did come up with a reasonable reason for the new time travel attack.  Instead of taking out one person they tried to take out all of John Conner's Lieutenants.   The timing is that they're all around college or post-college age.  So you see a guy killed in the drive-through of a burger joint, stuff like that.

Which brings me to one of the first verisimilitude breaks.  She's in a car in the drive-through.  She talks to the speaker.  But when she pulls up to the window the car is backwards.  Instead of putting the driver's window next to the drive-through window, the passenger side of the car is there.  Why?  Such a simple mistake, so there must have been a reason.

The other verisimilitude breaks were worse.  Things like Ahnold's "hydrogen fuel cell" becoming "unstable" when damaged, so when he throws it out of the car it explodes with the force equivalent to a few tons of TNT (small mushroom cloud.)   The new terminator has some sort of energy gun that's incredibly powerful.   And then when that gets damaged (it's deformable metal, how can it get damaged?) she has an Emergency Backup Weapon, a flamethrower.  Huh?  Where do the chemicals come from?  Oh, and the "nanomachines" that she injects into cars, giving her magical remote control abilities.  How in the world are they able to operate the steering wheel and brakes (though, I suppose, some brake systems are computer-controlled.  Albeit not on all of the vehicle models used in this movie.)   And the last I can remember, late in the movie they have a clean room and at one end they're testing a prototype jet.

Oh, there is one small gaffe that's becoming more and more common.  When one super-strong character throws another across the room with enough force to smash concrete, yet the thrower doesn't punch through the floor where they're standing or otherwise show evidence of how much force was imparted.

Also, the prototype machines were awfully effective.

Oh, yeah, and the new monster pooter virus.  And the supposed response.  A bit simpleton.

Man those gaffes just kept piling up, didn't they?

There were lotsa chase scenes, with lotsa wanton destruction.  Generally fun.   Most of the shooting scenes didn't play as well as the earlier movies.  Too static.  A lot of just standing around and shooting.

They had a brief appearance by Dr. Silverman, the pshrink in the first two movies.   His part was a bit too heavy-handed.  They just threw him in there to show him being still freaked by what happened in T2.  Just a gag, and then he ran off.

Besides Silverman, the only actor from the other movies was Ahnold himself.

Overall, the movie met my expectations.

On my brother's Total Movie Value Scale, Rental with Popcorn and Drinks.  Bruce warned me that it wasn't really a Terminator movie.  As an action movie, it was pretty fun.


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