TAKE ONE Presents... - Pod With Us If You Want To Live 3: TERMINATOR 3: RISE OF THE MACHINES (2003)

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

Simon and Jim discuss Jonathan Mostow's TERMINATOR 3: RISE OF THE MACHINES, a pivot from interesting and distinctive Terminator films towards generic early 2000s action films. They discuss this film's wild tonal whiplash and the great disservice it does to the film's more ambitious plot points, the casual laddish misogyny and voyeurism expressed through the T-X and the Kate Brewster characters, how terrible and generic the film looks including a stunt superficially similar to the famous truck flip from THE DARK KNIGHT, Arnold's small distraction during this film of running for Governor of California, and the naming conventions of blockbuster franchises after the third film.Content warnings: misogyny and patriarchy; nuclear war and apocalyptic destruction; casual homophobia; murder and violent death including the shooting of children; body horror and removal of skin.Our theme song is Terminator Theme Song (32Stitches Remix) by 32Stitches available on SoundCloud at https://soundcloud.com/32stitches/terminator-32stitches-remixFull references for this episode available in Zotero at https://www.zotero.org/groups/5642177/take_one/collections/MA22Y4VE/collection

And welcome back to Take On Presents, Pod with us if you want to live. A podcast where we're watching all the Terminator franchise films in order, contextualizing them and critiquing them. I'm Simon Bowie. I'm joined by my co-host, Jim Ross. Hi, Jim. Hello! Today we are watching 2000 3's Terminator 3, Rise of the Machines.

And I just wanted to point out something I noticed about naming conventions for Blockbuster franchises. So we've done, this is the fourth of the series that we've done in this kind of overall series about Blockbuster film franchises. And every single one has had a film with three in the title. Jurassic Park 3, Alien 3, Mission Impossible 3, Terminator 3. Then after that, they all stop having numbers in the title. Like, you can't make a film franchise where there's a fourth film and the fourth film is just, just whatever for. I can think of Toy Story 4.

I can think of the land before time for. But those are the only ones that come to mind. There's a grey area with the Fast and the Furious. Yeah, that's per se. Because they do, but they do in this sort of like, puny, half-hearted way, you know? Like, wasn't it Fast 5 and Furious Seventh? or something like that.

And then 8 was like the fate of the future. I don't know. They were doing weird shit with that. It's like, ha, we'll tease you with a number. But yeah, an interesting trend I noticed. And I thought, it's very unoriginal that everyone gets tired of numbers after three. Everyone changes their convention after three because they all get tired of it. And then I thought, oh wait, this is the fourth series that we've done.

and we've changed the naming convention Yeah, we've changed the title for that. Oh yeah. You do just get bored after a freak. Sorry, yeah, no, actually, actually that was deliberate and we intended it as a metacomontory on this phenomenon.

No, yeah, totally. Yeah, we definitely meant that. We definitely meant that. It wasn't at all that we just couldn't come up with a good title that was the something pod. So welcome back to Podwevers if you want to live. yeah but Terminator 3

Rise of the Machines What's your history of Terminator 3? Rise of the Machines I'm fairly certain I'm not 100% certain I'm fairly certain I saw this in the cinema Because I was certainly going to the cinema semi regularly around this point Because there was a Odean

In Douglas and Dundee Where I went to see stuff Certainly around this time I remember going to see the Angley Hulk at that cinema. Nice. So I'm pretty certain I saw this in a... I'm pretty certain I saw this in the cinema. If not, I definitely saw it

in its year of release, because I would have seen it as another one of these rentals. I've mentioned Blockbuster run here before. So I definitely saw it the year it came out, and I'm fairly certain I saw it in the cinema. Yeah. And I think I've maybe seen it once since then. I recall

watching it on DVD at some point, but otherwise, it's not what I've gone back to, lot. Maybe we'll discuss why. Maybe. We'll see. Yeah, I didn't see this in the cinema. I had this

on DVD. I said before I had the box set of Terminator 1 and 2. I wanted to complete that with Terminator 3, so I bought that on DVD and watched it. And I remember liking it quite a bit at the time. As a teenager, I think

Kristana Loken as the terminatrix. and fraud me as a teenager. I'm going to come back to that. Not really my type these days, but I was interested in that aspect as a younger man. But I didn't remember, I barely remembered anything about it

coming back to it. I remembered that it had an older John Connor and that it had these two terminators in it. And that was about the extent of it. I didn't remember Claire Danes was even in it. So coming back to it, this was all fairly fresh. But yeah, how this came about is there was obvious pressure after Terminator 2

Judgment Day did so well for James Cameron to produce another sequel. And Carol Co-Pitchers, who owned the rights to the franchise after Schwarzenegger made them buy them, said that they were going to make a Terminator 3 within the next 5 to 7 years after 1992. Tri-Star Chief Mike Medavoy said the film would probably take a couple of years. By the end of 1995, Carol co-filed for bankruptcy. And Cameron wanted to react to third film with the involvement of 20th Century Fox, who he'd been working with a lot.

He had done a 3D film ride called Terminator 2 Free Day Battle Across Time, which he said would be a stepping stone towards a third Terminator film. Which I think I've been on. Oh, really? I was going to say, I don't know anything about the kind of narrative. I remember very little about it,

apart from, I think, like a... Terminator skull flying out of the screen in 3D or something. But I definitely, I went to, peek into my nerdy history as a teenager here. It's at Universal Studios. Yeah, I won, I won a debating competition, and the prize was a trip to Florida. Oh, hell yeah.

And when I went on that trip to Florida, obviously that included kind of like going to various theme parks, and that was one of the things that I ended up going to. Lovely, but you don't remember the plot or any... I don't remember... No, no, I mean, I barely remember... I barely remember anything about that, apart from bizarrely, I remember at Disney World

you could... There were stalls that sold entire turkey drumsticks. So there were just people walking around Disney World chowing down on huge turkey legs. They were like a chicken drumstick. That sounds like a renal sense fair. kind of thing. Yeah, it was all

bit crazy. That's America. You know, the portions over there. Huge portions. Huge portions. I'm only small. I can't do it anymore. I'm not a young man.

It's the second time you said that during the safe. Are you having a mid-life crisis? It was my birthday a few weeks ago. Maybe it's on my mind. It's just the second time we've had a whistle. I'm not a young man anymore.

so there was a long and protracted issue about acquiring the rights Fox didn't want to acquire them Carol Co said it was too much Schwarzenegger got annoyed at Fox for giving ridiculous offers of like less than a million dollars for the rights

yeah it all goes around quite a bit But ultimately, Cameron's friend, Andrew G. Vanya, learns that the rights are available and negotiates behind the scenes to acquire the rights. Now obviously, this pisses Cameron off because Vanya didn't tell him he was going to get the rights. And their friendship entirely deteriorated because of that. Schwarzenegger still tried to get Cameron involved, but Cameron moved away more and more from it. He said, I just felt as a filmmaker maybe I've gone beyond it.

I really wasn't that interested. I felt like I'd told the story I wanted to tell. Vanyas said that Cameron felt that we stole his baby. Which I've read through these various twists and turns of sort of like the... The pre-production, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's not even really pre-production. What was pre-production? Pre-pre-production, yeah, they weren't even started.

And it's a bit weird to me. There's just so many contradictory things going on, you know? Like, he's not interested, but he's annoyed. and then Schwartz, like, you know, I don't know. The whole thing is just extremely confusing to me. It's one of the oddest, it's one of the oddest thing. And I think, like, technically, if you look at it, I think because of the protracted history,

I think this is technically an independent film. Well, yeah, I have a quote from Jonathan Mostow, the eventual director, who gets into some of that that I'll get into later. But, yeah, they eventually get a script together where John Connor was working in a dot-com company and the villain was the T1G, a female terminator with the ability to turn invisible. Cameron was given a kind of first refusal

and first refused. So other directors being considered were Angley. Christian Dugay, David Fincher. That would have been David Fincher doing a third one in a series. Yeah. After James Cameron's done one. The third one in the CDs with an iconic. lead.

John McTiernan, Ridley Scott and Roland Emmerich. Scott was offered 20 million but declined. He felt that the franchise wasn't his thing. He said it was like a Bond film and he didn't want to do a Bond film. Ultimately, Jonathan Mostow picks it up. Jonathan Mostow is a director who has directed Breakdown, U571, Surrogates. I haven't seen any of these. I've seen surrogates.

Right. I saw it once. It was not particularly well received, I don't think. I don't recall think he was that bad, to be honest, but it also wasn't that good either, so, you know. The McTiernan one is interesting, actually,

because of course, like, you did Predator. I could see that, yeah. I could see that could be a little bit closer. I mean, you can see why they didn't go with the, um, the invisibility aspect in the end because I do think so like something running around Los Angeles trying to kill people that can turn invisible

it's all but Predator 2 you know yeah you know so I can see I think invisibility does not play well on screen you know I think of the invisible car in dire another day yeah which is an interesting point to bring up actually because when we get into the actually talking about the film there are certain aspects of it which don't work but are very much hallmarks of the time and another example I can think of that frankly

is die another day you know so that's it that's an interesting comparison as well but yeah yeah yeah and and I guess the only other thing I'll say is that when the film's production budget was set it was initially set at

$170 million which made it in the most expensive film ever to be greenlit at the time now with a huge salary for Mostow and a huge salary for Schwarzenegger, $30 million. He eventually only received 29.25 million plus 20% of the profits.

We'll get into it, but he was running for Governor of California at the time. So his attentions might have been divided, and we'll see how that comes across in the text. Yeah, but it eventually comes out in July 2003, kind of a

summer blockbuster. And in 2003, it was a against the highest grossing films in that year. Number one, the Lord of the Rings, the Return of the King, Finding Nemo, the Matrix Reloed, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Curse of the Black Pearl, Bruce Almighty, the Last Summer Eye, Termerate 3, The Matrix Revolutions, X2, and Bad Boys 2.

I also forget that the two Matrix sequels came out with them. I was just going to say, I didn't remember that they came out in the same year. No. about it because those two I definitely saw in the cinema and I remember kind of feeling like a sort of like agonising weight between the two of them you wouldn't do that now

yeah yeah I remember that yeah it's quite something yeah I don't know this chart isn't grabbing me like Return of the King is obviously great the Matrix reloaded I loved at the time but I think it's kind of diminished by how disappointing revolutions was

yeah and I think like both of Matrix sequels are kind of like, you know, I don't think they're, I don't think they're terrible, but, you know, I mean, we've discussed them before in the context of other, other films, and obviously, is this the, is this the first one where we've looked at 2003, I think it must be. Yeah, it is. Yeah. I think what this kind of reflects to me, this chart, though, is, you know, we're not quite fully into kind of, kind of, like, like IP mining timing here because you know the matrix sequels are an extension of at the time reasonably recent original property finding

Nemo okay it's a Pixar animation but it's an original story Lord of the Rings was the first big cinematic adaptation of it really Bruce Almighty's original Pirates of the Caribbean you define original yes that is you know it's a new

it's not a continuation right we're not really fully into the era of the comic book film because you know X X-Men 2 is kind of credited a little bit with kind of like kicking that off a little bit

probably more so than its immediate predecessor I think what ultimately I'd say to is I find this looking back on it and thinking about even the things that I saw in the cinema as a teenager at the time this doesn't feel like a particularly inspiring era

of mainstream cinema to me no to be honest right um like Lord of the Rings sure but you know like the Matrix sequels eh

I mean Pirates of the Carbby was fun or at least the first one was but Bruce Almighty I remember seeing that the Sidvan kind of thinking eh it's all right you know the last samurai

eh it's all right you know it's just it's not particularly it's just not particularly inspiring to me. Yeah, exactly. And I think some of that some of what makes this an uninspiring period for me, I think, is

I think part of it is a response to films that were successful around the start of the century slash the end of the last one. And I think some of the problems I'm going to have with this spoiler alert, Terminator 3, I don't think is all that great. And, you know, we'll get into why. But I think some of the problems I have with it do reflect the time. And I think this even reflected in some of the films here.

I think some of those problems are common across films of this era, basically. Yeah. So I think I'm going to... I probably have three main problems with this film. And we can discuss them as we go through. But, well, two of them are kind of how generic it is and how dated it feels. Yeah. But yeah, we'll get into those as we run through. So, the film opens with voiceover, which kind of echoes Sarah's voiceovers from the last film.

This is John talking about kind of nuclear destruction in the future, and we start with an image of nuclear destruction as a bomb strikes a city. The shot looks terrible, by the way. Just to set the scene for later, I do think the shot looks terrible, to be honest. Yeah, there were about 600 special effects shots in this film. compared to the what was it about 40 in the previous film and and you've you start to feel that reliance on C.G especially towards the end but John Connor is giving back story and he's driving his motorbike in the dark John Connor is played by Nick Stahl who is replacing Edward Furlong and they did talk about getting Furlong back but the director wanted to start from scratch Furlong was also suffering from substance abuse problems at

the time. Yeah, I think this was around. I think this was around about the point where it was the peak of his experiences with alcohols and things like that. Yeah. So John Connor's giving backstory and he's driving his motorbike in the dark. Long story short, judgment day didn't happen, the computers didn't take over. John lives off the grid so no one can find him.

He has nightmares about, as always, robots hovering over human schools. And we see flashbacks of lots of robot skeletons. Shooting lasers. Only skulls. Only skulls. Yeah. I do have one comment here, just as we're going through the summary. It's a bit of a cinema sins complaint, but I'm going to make it nonetheless. It might be the same thing that's in my notes, but go ahead. Why would he have nightmares about T-800s?

Oh, yeah. The only T-800 he's encountered to date was his protector, and to quote him later on in the film, the closest thing to a father figure he's ever had. he should be having nightmares about liquid metal terminators yeah but they couldn't get rid of Patrick Beck minor point but it does speak to kind of like how poorly thought out I think some of these things are but anyway

well we get in the cinema things stuff out the way my note here is it's not clear to me why he has to live off the grid completely rather than just in a city with a different name and forged documents but the bigger thing is well the bigger thing is why didn't even move out of LA like he's still in Los Angeles just go anywhere else

yeah well actually let's get the cinema sins stuff out the way up front right because my second the only other cinema sinsy type complaint I have is almost exactly what you have there right but there's a reference made later in the film to how he was in

Baja in Mexico when his mother died right and then he disappeared so why in God's name if you're trying to stay off the grid, would you move from what is effectively, let's face it probably at the time, middle of nowhere, Mexico,

where nobody expects you to be, why would you go back to Los Angeles, probably one of the most surveyed cities on earth? Where a Terminator has already tracked you down once. It's mental. You know, like, as I said, like, there are more kind of egregious, it's just like, this makes no sense.

makes no sense. What are you talking about? That's fine. I don't need to deal with that completely later. Because as soon as you said that, I was like, but you went back to Los Angeles. Are you an idiot? I mean, the answer to that is actually based on the evidence of the text of his film, yes, he is a bit of an idiot. But, you know, anyway,

anyway. So it's Beverly Hills. And there's a time storm, like in the previous films, and it rips open a wormhole in the department store. And a nude lady appears through it. This is Christana Locan as the TX, the Terminatrix. She steals a woman's clothes and car,

she speaks for her phone using old-style modem dial-up language. That's fun. I kind of like that. Yeah. It was actually, you know, it was... I like that. It gives her the information she needs because she's connecting to the internet

through this kind of quick transfer of information. It's also one of the few things the film does where I think it updates some of the concept about how how folk were getting tracked down in the first two films and updates it for the technology of the era it comes out in,

you know? Like it's probably hard to imagine like for somebody who didn't deal with dial up internet, but like you became so familiar with that noise. Yeah. Like if you had dial up internet

like that, those sort of noises are just like seared into your brain basically. And you know, it's interesting. It's fun. It's good. It's good.

But yeah, she selects some targets using that kind of computer language. She gets pulled over by a cop, and there is a shot of her, inflating her breasts. Now, this is an utterly pointless moment of voyeurism, because after inflating her breasts, she doesn't even attempt. Yeah, I know, nothing even happens after her breast. She doesn't even say, like, oh, hi. She just says she likes his gun, and it is important. Plied kills him. It feels

pointlessly misogynistic. Like pointless. Just because you have a woman playing this character, they make her this kind of... Well, here's my thing. So I found an article by Rebecca L. Jones from Machine and Mench to Robot Bubbs, female presenting autonomous weapons systems

in live-action films 1927 to 2023. It's a very specific chapter. title. It says, you know, few people associate femininity with autonomous weapon systems, yet live action science fiction films have depicted lethal female presenting creations since the early days of cinema. She did an analysis of 350 feature-length live-action films with robots in them, and 135 of the films feature female presenting AI or robots.

80 of those films depict female robots that are girls. friends, sex bots and seductresses. Now, I have a kind of issue with her including Terminator 3 in that because, yes, there is this scene, but apart from that, she's never a seductress. I think kind of casting Cristana Loken, who is a model, and the way that the camera frames

the female Terminator, she is supposed to be, but in the text of the film, she never actually does any seducing. So the film wants to have it both ways Where she is both this sexy, lethal ninja character But they don't actually do anything with that She never tries to seduce anyone Yeah I'm comparing it for example to X-Men 2

Where there is a scene where Rebecca Romaine's mystique Does use her camouflage and her seduction To seduce a guard and knock him out But in this, the lady Terminator the Lady Terminator didn't even do that. Yeah, and the thing is, like, if you go back to this idea of, like, the termedars is infiltration units and, you know, they need to blend in. You could actually do something interesting here, right? And I'm not saying they need to linger on it, but, like, part of the reason that the TX gets this idea is it sees a Victoria's Secret Billboard, right?

So there is a comment to be made here potentially about how adopting this persona makes you more accepted. Right? There could be something interesting there. And it doesn't need to be a main strand of the film, but it could be just an interesting. But it doesn't do that, right? Certainly not within the text of the film. And I find that, you know, I don't know, there's a certain edge to the humour here, which we'll also talk about in another scene in the minute.

I just find it very tiresome sort of like four-edgy ladsmag type shite. So yeah, this is it. There is something interesting to be done with a female Terminator and with how a woman is perceived in different situations, you know, how people see a woman in infiltrating somewhere versus how people see a man infiltrating somewhere. And there's something interesting there, but they don't do it.

And instead they do this lazy, kind of misogynistic trope of she'll inflate her breast to get off this parking charge or whatever, this speeding charge. And it's clearly going into this misogynistic, what Rebecca Jones says is a trend of fetishized

eroticization and infiltration using kind of the idea of sex bots and female presenting sex robots. Like, somebody would need to tell me what is the it's doing it ostensibly sincerely,

albeit maybe with its tongue in its cheek, but can somebody explain to me exactly what the difference is between what has just happened in this scene and the robots that have guns come out of their breasts in Austin Powers? So they're specifically mentioned. Like really what's the difference here? You know.

Rebecca Jones goes through this kind of genealogy, this typology of a female presenting sex robots and they're in the same category in her in her typology it is the sex bots from Austin Powers and Kristana Loken in this 10,000 women auditioned for this role Famke Jansen was at one point the lead runner but ultimately she ended up focused on Gene Gray

I think in X2 we cut to Claire Danes who is shopping with her fiancé she gets a phone call from her military leader father. There is some really unnatural sounding exposition. Like, oh well, as you know, you're getting married in two weeks. Well, you know, I'd have my doubts and blah, blah, blah. The diet, like, James Cameron has been accused of, like, writing dialogue, like, he's never heard two people talk, right? And I do think there's something to that.

He wasn't, like, this film, which ironically he did not, right? honestly like some of it is just this type of stuff in it it's so bad it's just so bad it's it's not even

yeah I don't know it's yeah well I've never liked him you know dear but I need to focus now there's a computer virus spreading through the West Coast so he concerned about a computer that was spreading through the West Coast and he's skeptical about unleashing

Skynet the military secret weapon eliminate it. Yeah, fuddingly foreshadowing. We're cut to a desert where there is a time storm and Arnie appears. He heads to a roadside bar

to acquire clothes. It's a familiar scene from the previous two films. But this time, it's ladies' night and the women ogle Arnie's muscular body. Arnie approaches the stripper for his leather daddy clothes and he puts them on

and instead of cool sunglasses he has campy Elton John sunglasses that's the joke and presumably assault and presumably assaults an extremely camp meal stripper to get the clothes yes

so I don't even know where to start with this I just don't like I don't like we're going to get into a little bit about what this has been opposed with in a moment this entire film set up. So, yeah, I mean, the series is starting to repeat itself, and it is attempting to kind of mask this with farce or humour. But, like, Jesus, the tone shift.

There's a huge tone shift from the latter film to this film, from Action Blackbuster to kind of ironic pastiche of itself. And there's loads of little Arnie gag moments, in the middle of chases and action scenes where Arnie is like winking at the camera. And it all feels incredibly dated. Like it feels like you said, like it's situated in kind of early 2000s irony.

The joke here is that Arnie has the clothes of a gay man, including gay glasses. And like that feels like a really early 2000s, you know, edgy, ironic South Parky thing to joke about. It's also the tone, the tone is all over the place. Like I write about this point

in the film, right? So, we've spoken about the dialogue modem bit, right? And the reason the TX does that is to determine the addresses of a whole bunch of kids and young people who I think ostensibly grow up to be the

lieutenants of John Conliners. honor. Right. So in amongst all this happening, you've got somebody going around from home to home shooting children in the face. Like, in between all these gags about male strippers who are camp, and boobs inflating and, oh, he's got Elton's John style sunglasses. Ha, ha, ha, isn't this so funny? Just a light bit of serial child

murder in there. So, yeah, and as well as... What? What? What? What? What? What? are you going for here? As well as the tonal shift from, you know, T2 to this, there's a tonal shift within the film, like those tonal whiplash, like you say, in these scenes, these back-to-back scenes of kind of child murder and campy fun.

But also, like, spoiler, this film ends with the destruction of the world. And it starts with Arnie and funny sunglasses. The film doesn't know what tone it wants. you know combined with the there's this whole the tone of this entire scene where he kind of like gets it just doesn't sit right with me

it's like you know the the stripper is camp and it's ladies night and like the glasses are kind of very Elton Johnny like you know I mean Lusveida one of probably the most famously gay men on the you know surface of the planet and it's just like

it's all a bit oh ha ha ha ha you know Arnie's not gay he's a man's man do you get it? Do you get it yet? And it's like, it's just tiresome. It's this, like I said before with the boobs thing. It's like fucking terminator

intro by Nuts Magazine or something. It's like, what the hell is this? Yeah, it's all over the place. So, Jonathan Mostow did an interview with Vulture, with Bill Jaberie at Vulture, where he said, a lot of people

are asking, why do you even need a third Terminator? I felt that I had to disarm those people. So that's why we made the choice to use humor, which is front-loaded earlier in the movie. Some of it's too sticky. Some of it has not aged well with time. I'll be the first to confess. But if you went to the theatre at the time, it worked

with the audience. I was in the theatre at the time and it did not work with the audience. Good, I thought I was going to ask you. Yeah. I remember coming out of this film, kind of I think, eh, you know. No, it didn't. Like, you know, it's just like,

yeah. Combined with that, I, I'm very tired of the entire By this stage in my rewatch of this franchise, I'm very tired of the sunglasses thing. Yeah. Because the entire point in the first film

is he puts on sunglasses because he's had to scrape his fucking eyeball out of his eye socket and you can't pass for a human if you're walking around with an empty eye socket that's bleeding. Like I said, the series is starting to repeat itself. But the solution there

is not to do an ironic twist on it is to do something different. So we cut to John, who is breaking into a vets to steal drugs. Claire Daines works there and she arrives to deal with it. She disarms John and shoves him in a cage. She knows he's John Connor. She identifies herself as Kate Brewster because they were classmates. And I think they made out in a closet or something.

The Lady Terminator finds some targets. She kills them. She kills some children, like you say. She ends up at the vets to kill Kate. even though the natural place to search for Kate Rooster in the middle of the night would surely be her home. She keeps licking blood to analyse genetic samples so she can determine who they are, because apparently she has DNA records for Kate and John and whoever, and these lieutenants. But also she shoots someone because she thinks she's Kate, so she has DNA records but not a photo.

because there's so much about this film I've forgotten the whole kind of like licking blood to do a DNA test like what? What God's name is going on here? Look man, like this film was not designed for this kind of scrutiny. I know it's not. I'm fully acknowledging that we're the fools

for scrutinizing this film to such an extent. Because also I have another question here just while we're on the DNA test. thing, right? I'll maybe jump in the gun a little bit here. When she, when she tastes John Conner's blood, right? And, you know, it comes up, you know, primary target, John Connor, and she realizes, oh, you must be here. Why does she look aroused? It can't just be me me. It's like this look comes across and when, like, she's almost turned on by this or something. And it's, it's a weird, it's a weird concept, right?

The idea that this Terminator uses the tongue area as like some sort of sampling mechanism for DNA testing is weird in and of itself and then they layer extra weirdness on top of it. It's so odd. It's so odd.

Yeah, there's a lot about the Terminatorics that doesn't work. Yeah. And this is among them. I mean, at this point, I'd also had questions about kind of how time travel works in this series. So, you know, Skynet sends humans, sends robots back, but they always seem to come back in a linear fashion. So, you know, they come back to the 80s, they go back to the 90s, and now they're in the 2000s. And these gaps, these gaps in the film's logic only become apparent because films keep repeating these plot points.

So I'm only thinking about it now, because. it keeps happening. It's a problem with repeating yourself in this franchise, more than the films itself. So Arnie drives into the Lady Terminator and blows her up. Arnie picks up Kate. Now, he's never picked anyone else up before, but he does it here because she's a helpless woman, I think.

And we'll have more about Kate being helpless later in the film. John sees the Lady Terminator kind of recent. forming herself and runs into Arnie in the corridor and he has a moment of shock because like you say for some reason he's scared of the T-800. Arnie fights the Lady Terminator but she blasts him with her gun arm. She uses her fancy appendages to do to hotwire a police car to drive remotely while she drives a crane and Arnie pursues on a police motorbike. There's a chase scene.

I kind of like the idea of her remotely controlling two additional cars but in general the sense of space in the scene is never well established. So it's a bit murky. For example, John and Kate at one point suddenly end up in the suburbs, while the Terminators are driving through an industrial area, but then suddenly they're all in the same place again. Yeah, this entire bit actually,

now this is where I think from this point on the film, relatively speaking, starts to find its feet a little bit. Right, and I'll get into how that is the case, but I think this entire sequence is a little bit indicative of what the film does well and what the film doesn't do well, right? Because there's some impressive stunts in this whole kind of like truck chase sequence, right? And there's some nice beats, right? There's one bit where, there's a bit where kind of like, you know, there's an ambulance, which I think is one of the things being remotely controlled by the TX.

and Arnold's kind of, I mean obviously the CGI algorithm, kicks it over, right? You know, which is obviously kind of an indication of the amount of strength there. There's some nice beats in there, but it's all kind of enabled and augmented with this sheen of really like naughties era CGI. Yeah, so this never looks as good as the previous film. No, no. That goes for floaty CGI, which kind of lacks. weight, and there's a lot more of this later,

and special effects shots that never look as real or visceral as the practical effects of the previous two films. But it's also the cinematography and the lighting, which just feels a lot less cinematic. It has the look of a TV movie, or like a straight-to-VHS movie. There's a scene later where they're standing around

discussing things by a camper van, and it looks so cheap. Like, despite, you know, we'll get on. to it, but this has some of the largest kind of narrative events of the series so far, but it all feels so small. It feels small. Yeah, and it kind of yanks you right out of it. You know, and I think, we'll see, this is where you kind of get the first proper hints of it, and like the stuff that you've mentioned there will properly be cemented later on. But on top

of the things that we mentioned there around the naughty CGI, which I think you see in this sequence, right? And this is where, like, your Die Another Day comparison is at, right? Because I think the Mummy Returnens, I think, was 2001 or something. It's got that sort of feel, kind of like the over-reliance on CGI. Die Another Day was 2002, similar thing. Hulk was 2003, and that was always a bit

hampered by the amount of CGI, well, the amount of CGI of the quality that was achievable at the time, let's say, the reliance on it. But on top of that, right, because let's face it there were effects sequences in Terminator 2

right but they were short right we said the number of shots the editing and the shot choice right which links into your point about kind of like the cinematography it's so bad it's just so bland and poor and it's like

I don't know I don't know how you can watch right to harking back to our previous episode I do not know how you can watch the truck bike dirt bike chase from Terminator 2 in particular, and I think you could also bring in the helicopter chase towards the end of that film. I do not know how you can watch those sequences from this film's immediate predecessor and think that this cuts it. Because it just doesn't. It just

doesn't. In this chase scene, there is a truck with a crane on it, and it does a flip that is superficially very similar to the familiar shot from the Dark Night. Yeah. But that was practical and that shot is famous because it was practical and they actually flipped a truck. This is like floaty CGI and it's less well staged generally. So despite being more or less

the same thing, the same maneuver no one remembers this and I forgot it two minutes after it happened. The one thing I do remember from the sequence even before I rewatched it is when the arm of the crane with the T-800 on the end of it smacks through

like a structure. And I think the reason I remember that is because by and large, that was actually the one part of it that was executed fully practically. And, you know, whereas you know, and to return to it, but even then, that's kind of ruined by this very

choppy editing. It doesn't linger on anything. When the truck does flip with the CGI, it's obscured by a whole bunch of shite in the foreground. You know, it's just not good. It's not good. So Arnold Schwarzenegger is running for Covenant of California during this film, shoot and was eventually elected later that year.

And so they had a lot of VIPs visit the set, and they had a lot of politicians visit the set. And on one of the days they were filming this chase scene, Bill Clinton came to set with the Secret Service and everything. So, yeah, they'd built several city blocks in L.A. and were demolishing them as part of this chase scene. And Jonathan Mostow says, Bill Clinton had just got out of office, and he's looking at this thing and he's going, wow, this is amazing.

Like on a whole other level of amazing of what he had seen. And I thought, okay, if he thinks that's amazing, I think it's amazing. Jonathan Mostow in this interview has this kind of defensiveness around Terminator 3 where he catches everything with in like, well, audiences loved it.

Well, former President Bill Clinton loved it. So it's got to be good. I don't know, man. I could make a lot of comments about things that former President Bill Clinton likes at this point. We won't. We won't. But let's just say I'm not taking that as a bar for quality and things

you should like doing. So moving on. Gunlands. It also occurs to me that we're recording this episode in December 2025 and it won't come out until March 2026. So fuck knows what's going to happen in the intervening time.

Yeah. Who knows what else could come out in there. Yeah, exactly. Well, there's an exposition scene. So John learns that this is a different Terminator to his ozathe's far for figure. I mean, yeah? Duh. Like, you saw him melt. I suppose with time travel shenanigans and stuff, I suppose.

The Terminator tells him that they only postponed Judgment Day and that they're being pursued by a TX, which is an anti-terminator terminator. And Arnold says that he's an obsolete design. which is kind of a nod to how old Schwarzenegger is at this point. They also catch Kate up on everything. At one point they go to a rest-up, and there is a recurring talk-to-the-hand joke that feels incredibly dated.

It's painfully early 2000s. There's some scenes that John and Kate discuss the future. You know, he kind of alludes to the trauma that said I had about the future and this certainty of apocalypse, and it really highlights that Nick Stoll, can't communicate that intensity that Linda Hamilton did in the last film. He's delivering the same kind of speech, but he just can't do it in the same way as Linda Hamilton. The TX goes and kills Kate's fiancé. She disguises himself as him to talk to some cops,

give away Kate's location. And that location is Sarah Connor's grave, because her coffin is actually a cache of high-powered weapons. She was actually cremated in Mexico after dying of leukemia. Stahl is again given an opportunity to emote and kind of portray grief but doesn't do very well at it. Kate shoots the Terminator but it catches a bullet between his teeth. It's kind of a winky, joky bit. I feel like I'm cutting whole scenes here and there's whole scenes that I've left out of the sun of me because it just doesn't feel like they're essential to the character. Yeah but it's because, I mean frankly it's because the film doesn't really do anything with them.

and they're uses vehicles for the like there are some things in that in that sequence you've kind of rattled through there there are bits and pieces that work for me like Arnold's delivery continues to be quite it continues to be quite good for me

right I don't think it's as good as this but like there's things like it it kind of hits similar notes in ways that are you know good like I think when he said I am not cheating you you know like that stuff like that works when he shouts

relax in the most unrelaxing way possible like there are bits and pieces here that work but they're bits and pieces they don't really have anything around them there's no real sense of and I think rather criminally at this point if you think back to the way the way

the 1984 film progressed and particular kind of the chase feeling of Terminator 2 it feels very meandering at this point. There's no real sense that there's not a huge sense of urgency and peril,

you know, and that, that for this, you know, and I know we've said we don't want the films to repeat themselves, but like, you know, you can achieve the same thing with different narrative beats, whereas this is basically

actually kind of repeating narrative beats, but not re-achieving that same feeling. And at this point, at this stage in the film, it does frankly feel a little bit dull and lacking in urgency, you know, because this is all, well, this is where we're going to stop and slow down and, you know, they'll get to know each other and we'll get a little bit of extra exposition. It's just, it's not, it's just all very ineligent, you know, it's... Yeah, I mean, I feel like Arnie's phoning it in. His performance just seems muted,

he seems checked out. He's kind of, he knows he can do this kind of robotic Arnie in his sleep, and he is. It works, because he gets some good quips, and this is what Arney's, he's, he's, what Arnie does, but he didn't seem to have the same level of performance as the previous two films. I mean, his mind is on running for Governor of California, understandably. So he just seems to check out through the whole film, to me. I mean, to be honest with you, I think the main legacy of his performance in this film is a roundabout, if you go to round about the late naughties or something, I think it was quite a thing on the internet to find soundboards for different celebrities. and one common one would be Arnold Schwarzenegger.

There'll be quite a few quotes on this film that make it onto the Arnold Schwarzenegger soundboard that you'd get on like E. Baume's World in 2008 or something. You know, talk to the hand, I'm not shitting you. Relax. You know, I think there's a high presence of this film alongside like, you know, jingle all the way in kindergarten cop. Yeah. Yeah. You know. For better or worse, that's its main legacy, I think.

Yeah. So the police arrive at the cemetery John despairs that he's no leader The terminate provokes him He says anger is more useful than despair The TX is in a police car This bit's good The TX is in a police car

And kills a cop By pushing an arm through the driver's seat And hence the torso of the driver And then using the arm to drive That's pretty good That's fairly That feels more Kind of Terminator 1 gory

but again you suffer from the whiplash of this coming after Terminator Arnold, mean, or quippy. So it doesn't quite match, but it is a fun bit. Recurring favourite, Dr. Silberman arrives to talk to Kate. He's a little more than a comic relief cameo. You know, he runs away as soon as he sees the T-800 because he's kind of rationalised it all as a psychosis. The Terminator shoots up the police with zero casualties. It's unclear why he's concerned about human casualties, because John hasn't told him to.

I think we later find out that Kate told him in the future not to hurt anyone. But at this point, it's unclear. They're escaping a hearse, pursued by the TX, who uses a circular sawarm to cut open the roof. She damages her arm gun, it becomes an armed flamethrower. Kate is sad about her fiancé, who she just, just discovered has been killed. And it's around about this point where

you realise the film is not going to do anything particularly technically artful with anything it's doing here, right? Because it's around a bit when the TX is giving chase there's a moment where she's running alongside on the side of the road and then leaps from this higher

position onto the hearse, right? and then starts to cut it open. This should be, it could be, and it should be great, right? This should be an absolutely iconic moment from this film, but the editing

is so, so bad. I think the shot of, like, Kristana Loken leaping onto the car. First of all, you don't see the start of it. I think you see it for all, for all of about a second or something

and it cuts away before she lands on it. And I'm looking at this, like, I think about so many things, like, I mean, you know what, frankly, I'm going to go to the bloody fast and furious films and I can't even remember which one it was, but there's one where like, you know, someone explodes and Vin Diesel

flies over a bridge and lands on a car or something, right? Even those films, they know that that's the thing it's doing and it lingers on it, and it was in trailers and it was one of the mean marketing shots, you know, all this sort of stuff. think about even kind of blockbuster films where it's even all done with

CGI where this was hellful more than I'm thinking of like Black Panther when Tachala like leaps onto the hood of this vehicle and like it's lingered on I'm thinking about the dark night when or is it a dark night? Yeah the dark night when like Batman like slams down the roof of this car right these shots that people

go back to and remember from these films and this film it just waste it cut cut cut cut cut cut cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. It's chopy. It's horrible. It's got this flat, plain lighting that has no drama about it at all. It's, it, there is no artfulness in this. And to go back to your original point, I think this is the point in the film where I was like, right, okay, this is just going to look like a TV show from the Notties.

There you go, yeah. You know, that's, that's what it, that's what it looks like. there's no attempt to evoke a motion through the visuals, paint a picture that you'll remember in a very literal sense, no artfulness to it. It's just, it is, this is the point where I decide this is an ugly film. It's not just a bland film. To me, it's an actively ugly one at this point. And this is the camper van scene that I mentioned when we were talking about this earlier.

Because they come to this camper van and the Terminator does more exposition, says that the TX will now go after Kate's father because he had control over Skynet. So John tries to convince the Terminator that they need to protect Kate's father, but the Terminator told him that Judgment Day is today, which he could have mentioned earlier. And they need to go to Mexico. It's like critical information.

Yeah. Yeah, by the way, all this ship we'd be doing, we're all going to get annihilated about, I don't know, slightly before dinner time. Yeah. Yeah, not clear why we had to go get those weapons If Judgment Day is imminent Not clear why that little errand was on the agenda

John threatens to kill himself if they don't go protect Kate's father And since the Terminator's mission is to protect John He must go blah blah blah Yeah, Kate learns that the Terminator takes her orders And that she will be John's wife and second in command and Kate sent the Terminator back because John was dead in the future, assassinated by this very Terminator before he was reprogrammed. And that doesn't lead to any tension later on.

It almost doesn't come up again. So we cut to Kate's father, who is still dealing with this computer virus, and it's taken control of all their monitoring systems and some nuclear submarines. The TX infiltrates the military lab and hijacks. a T1 drone which is kind of these early terminators who look like

something from Robocop or I think you've got in your notes Wally Yeah I'm not I understand it They were designed by Stan Winston But like I don't I wasn't a fan of them

They kind of look a bit like The way I've described them Is they look like Wally In like Robocop Omnicorp cosplay That's kind of what it looks like to me You know It's like

Wollies dressed up as something from Robocop for Halloween. Yeah, I'm not, they don't, they don't work for me. And that's beyond like even, at one point in this sequence that's about a kick off now. I swear to God I didn't bother to go re-watch it because

I don't want to re-watch this film after this episode. But I'm fairly certain one of them shrugs at another one. One of the drones? No, one of the, like, you know, the Wally, like original terran. I'm pretty sure one of them shrugs at another one. And this feels like a bit of an over-personification of something that's meant.

Anyway, you know. Yeah, I mean, for such a huge threat, like, you know, this is like DefCon 1, nuclear submarines are being taken out. It all feels so small scale. Because there's like four characters that we're following. Like, it doesn't feel the story. It feels like a TV episode. Yeah, the story feels too big for the scale of film to sustain.

It's just, it doesn't. because there's one line that also sticks out to me in this point that's like you know people running around in this one room on this set that you know

that's meant to be showing the impending apocalypse right and I think then a bunch of gunfire comes out from one of these you know Wally

cosplay terminators right and Nick Stahl just says, it's the machines they're taking over. And I'm like, it's one machine packed up stairs. Like, what are you talking about? This thing is less capable than the Dalek at the moment.

Like, what are you even talking about? The machines they're taking over it. It's just like, it feels so small. It's just feels so small. And the thing is, as a result, it feels overly dramatic, but it shouldn't feel overly

dramatic, right? At this point in the story, an artificial intelligence has just taken over the military systems of the only military superpower on Earth. It's, oh, oh! It's so weird. Yeah, I mean, Roland Emmerich was in that list of directors,

and I was thinking, like, Roland Emmerich would insert some shots of chaos around the world. I mean, he would follow a wider range of characters, for one thing, but he would at least insert some shots of people around the world having trouble. Traffic lights going crazy. whatever, these traditional signifiers that society is collapsing. Yeah, not just some large sheets of safety glass

getting broken. Yeah, in a military base, in one military base. Yeah, so Kate's father is ordered to deploy Skynet, and he does so, but he's all frowny about it. So Skynet takes over, and he immediately loses control. The TX shoots him, and

Arnie blasts her down in elevator shaft, he says, she'll be back. Zing. Yeah. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. As we said, the drones start shooting people.

John says that the machines have started to take over. Kate's father's dying, but he sends John and Kate to the Skynet System Corps at the Crystal Peak Secure Facility before dying. Yeah, I mean, Kate is having

a hell of a day here. Like, her workplace burned down, her fiancé was killed, her dad's just been killed. We never really stopped to focus on her pain

because she is a woman and a secondary character and is secondary to John's emotional journey. And so through these scenes, she starts flirting with John, even though her fiancé died mere hours ago. And her dad just died.

Yeah, she shoots a drone and there's a little surprised moment because you know, she's just a feeble woman. Yeah, so that's the first thing. I'm also good at, like the conversation earlier about like it being revealed that in the future they are husband and wife and the earlier revelation that they made out as teenagers I'm returning to that because there's then this line you remind me of my mother dramatically like so first of all this is back it's like ha ha you're a feeble woman you

shouldn't be able to do that right so that's the first thing that kind of sits wrong with me about this and it's like I'm sorry with this is such a weird moment right within the text of the film, right? You know, or, sorry, as the text of the film, it's a bit weird, right? It's a very forced attempt to claim

some female badassness, as I've put it, in a film which has been to my mind, aggressively uninterested in it to this point. Right? Yes, I mean, ostensibly the female Terminator is like a female

badass, but isn't, apart from that scene with her breast and the way the camera frames her, generally doesn't do anything feminine. And he's encoded as feminine. Yeah, right? So that's the first thing. It's been uninterested in trying to

do anything with this to this point, including with the Cape Brewster character, frankly. If they'd led up to this in some way, and maybe it wouldn't so weird. Also, within the narrative, like within the film itself, is gross and weird and Edipal in a really stupid way. It's like

you know, you've just so you've already found out in the story at this point that this is your future wife and you're the first thing that you say to her that indicates that in any way you're impressed with her is you remind me of my mother. It's

weird. It's really weird. You know, it's just such a, it's just another indication of this film where in the script in particular Right. It's just not thought. I, it's weird. Like, you know, I mean, genuinely, like, as Kate Brewster, you'd be standing there within the world of it going, that's a really weird thing to say. That's a really weird thing to say.

You know? It's weird. It's just so weird. It's like, oh, God. Yeah, it's weird. It's, it's just the kind of early 2000s treatment of women. So we talked about this in the mission in podcast. possible two episode, where there's just this kind of... Which is very firmly of this sort of ego. Just this kind of ironized sexism, where women are always treated as inferior, and occasionally they do something badass, but you have to point it out,

and they have to point to it because it's special. And it's just this lazy, lazy misogyny of the early 2000s that is, I guess, a reaction to kind of the action heroines of the early 90s. before we kind of get to later action heroines. But it also just seems to be the sort of tone that you get away with in this era of filmmaking. Because frankly, I mean, this is a very mild version of it, but this is the same sort of thing that we spoke about it with aliens versus Predator Requiem.

And it was a big strand in that film, right? And that kind of comes at, I would say, probably the tail end of this, right? Because that was 2007. but part of the reason that film was poorly received was it was technically a horrible film but also in terms of tone I think it was kind of getting towards the end of period where you could get away with this sort of like casual laddish misogynistic shite yes you know um you know I don't want to downplay I'm not saying that sort of thing doesn't exist now in in popular media but there was a pride in it I think around

this sort of period where it was like this is funny, we are being funny if you don't like it then you don't get funny. So this was the defence of kind of South Park of kind of lads mags in the UK there were a lot of lads mags who

were doing laddie things and talking about women in awful ways but doing it ironically and postmodernly but yeah it just it feels dated and obviously it's embedded in misogyny so the TX and determine it a fight.

A lot of the fight is kind of floaty CG, so even though they're bursting through toilet blocks, it doesn't feel real or impactful. It feels like everything's lightweight and nothing has any heft to it. But she manages to reprogram him, overpower him and reprogram. John and Kate escape through a particle accelerator

with the TX in pursuit. She gets attracted by a strong magnetic field and she can't escape and she gets stripped down to her skeleton. Kate shouts just die you bitch which seems out of character for her and just a note on the kind of environment here

these are all kind of generic military sci-fi labs like it's it's just an entirely generic lab environment and this comes to the third issue with that I've had with this film which is you know

I mentioned the datedness I mentioned the tonal whiplash My first problem is that it's just really generic and really forgettable. It just feels like a very... There's all like sound stages of Los Angeles. It feels like a nothingy blockbuster of the time. It's just a generic actioner that they have pieced it into the Terminator franchise. The dialogue's very unnatural.

It's all samey. You know, say what you will about James Cameron, but he is a director who can add distinctiveness. And this doesn't feel distinctive. This just feels like every other action. film of the early 2000s. Yeah, like you compare kind of like the visuals of

the Terminator compared to this and it's like, what are you doing? What are you doing? Yeah, it comes to have to look as well, which we've talked about quite a bit. But John and Kate find a plane, Kate conveniently knows

how to fly it, but the partially reprogram Terminator finds them and he begs them to get away. He struggles against his own programming, and he shuts himself down rather than kill John. So then John and Kate fly to Crystal Peak. The Terminator reboots. The TX is still alive, crashes a helicopter into Crystal Peak and comes after them. But then the Terminator crashes into the TX in an even bigger helicopter.

And he says, I'm back. Yeah. Also, it's something's ridiculous thing where I kind of want to cut together a parody of this for bigger and bigger. bigger helicopters just keep bigger and bigger helicopters just keep slamming into the same bunker. Yeah, so my problem with the scene is that it's helicopters slamming into the bunker

twice and then he says I'm back. I'm like, no, you can't do two riffs on the same line in the same movie. Choose one. I don't know. There's something about kind of like the bigger helicopter slammed it where I just want, I do want to do a version of, you know that seeded

community where they're like double crossing and triple cross. Yeah, yeah. We've done that. I kind of want to do that. You know, it's just ridiculous. There's always a bigger helicopter. Yeah.

So, Arnie is half robot skeleton now, and he holds the blast door to the lab open. The TX is crawling towards them menacingly. John says, thank you to the Terminator, and the Terminator says, we'll meet again. Yeah, like when you murder him in the future. You can't build a sweet moment.

out of that. Yeah. It's just... But the Terminator uses his hydrogen fuel core to blow up the TX once and for all, but it also collapses the way out of Crystal Peak. John and Kate descend to blow up Skynet,

but they discover that it's not Skynet's core. It's just a bunker from the 80s. They start receiving radio transmissions from various US military officers. And John takes charge embracing his destiny as the leader of the revolution. And then the world ends. We get a voiceover telling us that Skynet became self-aware

and the Judgment Day happened and a bunch of nuclear bombs go off. Notably, no people are in these shots. No people are seen being destroyed by bombs. So they are less effective than the single shot in Terminator 2 of children being evaporated by nuclear destruction. But yeah, the world ends, and then the film ends. Now, we've talked about the tonal whiplash of this film,

going from kind of the campy fun of Arnie having gay sunglasses to the world ending, but like it doesn't work for me because it's all felt so small-scale. Now, there is an article by Christopher Jensen called The Future We Have Already Made, Fatalism in Terminator Free Rise of the Machines, where he says, one might even say that while the film takes its relation to our real, world more seriously.

It is more self-aware of its own fictional conventions. Those are the popular science fiction genre as a whole and the Terminator series in particular and he's more willing to play with audience expectations. I guess that's a very generous reading. But then he says, the problems of our society, those

that will lead to our destruction, are systemic, not endemic. So even the phrase system core becomes an ironic joke here, since it implies endemic thinking about the problems they are facing. The systems we have put in motion and the problems present in those systems are not going to be solved by a single heroic act.

So he's kind of saying it's deliberate that there's all this talk about the system core and they'll go and fix the system core and fix everything. And that is a subversion of this idea that you can fix everything quickly. I think this is a very generous reading of the film that I think is just playing into lazy tropes, if we're being honest. Yeah, I think it does hit upon something with this film

though, right? Because there are, it's one of these films where, I think I've made it quite clear that I think the script and the way it shot is, is dog shit, right? You know, like I'm gonna be fairly unvarnished about that, right?

This is not a good film. Have I seen worse films? Yes, of course I have, but like, you know, I think the drop-off I think I've got to go through this in my head here, right? The franchises that we've looked at I think you will struggle to find

you've probably got a bit of a grey area here with the Alien versus Predator films and like whether they're canon or not and this sort of thing, but I think of the series that we've looked at you will struggle to find a bigger drop-off in quality between two entries here. Right? Yeah.

And like we can argue the toss About whether it was a specific one that meets that But like it is quite the climb down And I think What's annoying about it is If you look at kind of A couple of little things that it does There's the teeniest

tiniest tiniest tiniest grain Of a good film here Right In particular It is quite a brave ending Right This is a surprisingly bleak ending

Yeah, on the ending, that is the first thing that Mostow gets asked about in this interview. And he says, what enabled us to do the very dark ending was that Terminator 3 was an independent film. So he talks about how Warner Bros distributed it in America, so he distributed it in foreign territories. But those studios weren't involved in the making of the movie. One person at Warner and one person at Sony could have a copy of the script. So they get to read ahead of it. they got to read it ahead of time but then

after that they didn't interfere with it at all. He just made the movie and had it been a studio film he says we never would have been able to do a dark ending like that. He also wanted it to keep a secret so they only had the premiere two nights before the film's release now that's often in the industry

an indication that you have a stinker on your hands and you don't want people to review it before the release so I don't know to what extent he's being honest there but yeah they held it before the release he feels now in retrospect that if they had teased a little more that there was a surprise coming at the end it would have done better for the box office domestically and he thinks that's one of the reasons it did better overseas

no I think that's nonsense yeah I have to be honest like because I think because the issue is right it's a surprise amazingly bleak ending, right? And it's quite brave in that respect. But I think the problem is it's not really it's not built up to it. It has no impact. No. Like it kind of

floats past you, you know? You know, we don't see like John Conner's friends dying in the nuclear apocalypse because he don't have any friends. He's as he said at the start off the grid and has no one, has no attachment. It's not even that. You don't even have

have anybody else in that bunker, kind of like reacting, reacting in horror to what's happening, because it's just the two of them. Yeah. Everyone Kate knows has died earlier that day. Well, yeah, exactly, right, that as well. But it's like, but I look at things like there's the bravery to go for that type of ending, right? It doesn't stick that landing, but, like, sure, okay, right? But there's a bravery to go for that particular type of ending.

I also think there are hints here, because you've got to remember, like, the last The previous film came out in the early 90s. It's now the early naughties, right? The internet is a thing by this point, right? You know, it's not the internet that we know now, recording this in the mid-2020s, but it is a thing, right? We know it's changing the world. And this idea is kind of seen in a few places, right?

The screeching of the dial-up modem that she uses to access a database of children's location so she can murder them, right? there is the idea of so much of our critical infrastructure being given over to computers and there's quite a lot of cyber security stuff going around. You could actually even argue that the remote control of the cars in that chase scene is a major difference compared to previous films. And that kind of evokes a lot of concerns we have right now about kind of like, you know, who actually controls the things that we are bringing into our homes and trusting our lives with, right?

There's actually some interesting ideas here, right? But they don't do anything with it, right? Instead it focuses on these, like, absurd little lads maddy jokes and tonal whiplash and shitlighting and choppy editing and flat visuals. And it doesn't really do anything that would allow you to jump off on these ideas, right? And then when you get into the script, right, it's so ineligent and concerned with getting from A to B to C, it doesn't allow you to give any colour to those things, right? And I think that's what's a little bit frustrating about it. So to go back to the reading in that article that you've gone across,

like, I do think there is the very slight kernel of a good, I'm not even going to say a good film, but there's the kernel of a good hook for a new Terminator film. in there, right? But the execution is just so bland and crap that you don't care about any of it.

Yeah. I think, you know, yeah, there's something about context as well, kind of political context. You know, the first Terminator film was, as we've said in previous episodes, in dialogue with kind of Cold War ideas

of nuclear extinction and nuclear extinction, and nuclear destruction and the second one was kind of still engaged with that but in a kind of post fall of the Soviet Union way where it's still a concern but not so much this is a decade later

more than a decade later and America has changed America is absolutely in the ascendant it's been struck by 9-11 by this point but it is about to war, or maybe already is raging war, I can't remember the exact timelines, in Iraq. They're about to invade Iraq in 2003.

So America is, you know, cutting a sway through the world and bringing democracy to the rest of the world. So there's a certain, I don't know, end of history idea to American ascendancy. And Carl Friedman touches on this in an article called polemical afterwards, some brief reflections on Arnold Schwarzenes. and on science fiction in contemporary American culture. Where he says, the aesthetically joyous destruction and humiliation of the human body, including the mostly off-screen extinction of 3 billion human lives on Judgment Day, the Day of Nuclear Holocaust,

seems ominously reminiscent of Italian futurism, and certainly Walter Benjamin's famous gloss on the latter is directly relevant to the Terminator trilogy. Humanity's self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as a lot of, an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. And that's this. Like this is an asceticized vision of the destruction of humanity,

where it's just like a plot twist. There's such a level of ironic detachment that the entire destruction of the world is nothing but plot twist. So whereas Terminator 2 took this, had an existential threat of extinction and took it seriously enough to be scary. this is just so disconnected from the realities of nuclear destruction you know like I say we see no people being destroyed

no it's just bombs falling on cities and bombs falling through the sky and whatnot that it feels like nothing like it just feels like a plot device you get more of a sense of it in is it Catherine Bigelow is a house full of dynamite yeah I used oh Christ what's the answer

a house of dynamite. Yeah. You get more of a sense of it in that, and you don't see any nuclear destruction in that. There's no CG heavy shots like here, but that feels... It's funny, you know, I'm glad you mentioned that film, because it is actually the one that kind of came to mind when I was thinking about that.

It's interesting because that film's come out in a... almost kind of... I don't want to say post-nuclear age, but it's like... It's kind of... It's part of the tapestry of geopolitics at this point. I don't think there's as much anxiety around it, But this feel it's just like, I don't know, it's just, it's also weightless.

Like, both narratively, visually, like, you know, no impact whatsoever. Yeah, there should be more. A film that ends with the destruction of the world should feel weightier. You should feel that heaviness. And you don't. And maybe it's because, you know, 90 minutes ago you were watching Arnold Schwarzenegger laughing at having some gay little glasses. Yeah, it's Yeah, it's not, and I think part of the issue with this film, right?

I mean, it has many issues, as we've discussed, but I think to return to the idea of, you know, these franchises suffering identity crises, right? Yeah, I mean, this is a great example of that. Yeah, because I think what this film has is a fundamental misreading of what made Terminator 2 in particular good, right? Because I think this film, there are two main strands that I'm thinking of when I say that. The first is the over-reliance on effects. Yeah. Right? because Terminator 2 has become famous and would have been famous at the point of production of this film for its special effects.

But as we discussed on the last episode, and we've discussed briefly here, they're relatively sparing in their use of them, right? Or at least certainly the computer-generated ones anyway, right? It's sparing with them and it has impact as a result, and I think it's very artfully considered how they're presented for how long and all the rest of it. Here it's a crutch, right? Here it is a crutch. And one shot in particular stands out to me. It's when they're having to fight in the graveyard.

The TX is shot with a rocket launcher and is launched across the cemetery and smacks through a tombstone. Right? And the tombstone is CGI. the puff of presumably stone dust which is kicked up by

or going through it is CGI and I have to assume although I don't know that the TX itself in that shot is CGI Yeah Right There is no reason

For me I don't see any reason Why I film with this budget Could not have done that practically No Yeah Yeah Right

It's not a shot That inherently required it right and I'm not one of these kind of like people who just whines about CGI all the time it's like you know the best there are a lot of things that you can do in cinema now which are not possible practically they're only possible

CGI in this era filmmaking that is also true but you need to be very deliberate about your creative choices about when you're using purely practical purely CGI or one augmented by the other right this film does not do that

it uses CGI and computer generated effects as a crutch. It uses it as a crutch because it thinks, as a lot of films did at this time, right? And this is why I mentioned Die Another Day

and I'm glad you mentioned The Invisible Car because that's one of the key things there in that film. Die Another Day, Hulk, you know, various other films of the era. They think the effects are the spectacle. Right? They are not used to heighten the spectacle. They are not used to sell the spectacle. They treat them as if they are the spectacle.

Yeah. Right. And this film doesn't understand this. And the reason you can say it doesn't understand it is because it does a couple of things that are good by accident, right? There's one scene where they're driving the camper where the T-800 cuts into himself to remove a fuel cell, right? And it's done practically, and I'm not appraising it for the practical effects, but it required like, you know, Schwarzenegger to stick his head on top of a fake body and bring his arms round what sat in the city. You know, like it required, you know,

required a bit of movie-making artistry to pull off. Sure. Right. And it doesn't do that in a lot of other places. It does these things by accident occasionally, right? Because I think basically they probably didn't want to trust CGI with that shot. But it trusts CGI too much. It thinks the effects are the spectacle,

not enabling the spectacle. That's the first thing, which is something this film fundamentally misunderstands in terms of how successful Terminator 2 was. The other one is the quippiness. And I mentioned it, like, there were bits of Terminator 2 that didn't work for me and, like, you know, some of that Asta-Baby stuff and things like that, it didn't, you know, it's like it didn't bother me, but it didn't really work for me. But this film takes that and it runs with it, particularly for the first half of the film. Like, they even reference it explicitly, Joaquins. because, you know, you don't remember any of this,

you know, Astelavista baby and all that. And it's like, oh, God, just shut up. Like, you know, just stop talking, you know, and it relies on that stuff. And as I said, I like some of Schwarzenegger's delivery of things like, I am not cheating you and things like that. But it's so, it thinks that's what people liked about that film. Have you seen the deleted scene for this film where...

Oh, yeah, I was going to bring it. I was going to bring that up, actually. So, yeah, I'm glad to you. I'm glad you. And a good example of it, frankly, is that? Yeah, for the audience, deleted scene for this film where they are showing a promotional video. The military is showing a promotional video for their new robots. And there is a scene of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a young sergeant, Sergeant Candy, who will be the model.

Sergeant William Candy. There you go. With that voice, I might add. So me just going through puberty live on here. Yeah, he's Sergeant William Candy, who will be the model for their new line of humanoid robots. But he has this accent, this very strong southern accent, that Arnie is putting on.

No, that someone is putting on. I actually read it. It was Samuel L. Jackson, who he's putting on that accent. Oh, yeah, no, that's right. I did see that. And kind of layered over the top of Arnie's performance. And it's a joke, you know, essentially. it's a joke about how this big burly man has this funny accent

and they're going to change it in post or whatever. But yeah, it doesn't fit. Like, it's much too broad comedy, even for this film, and it doesn't fit at all. And yet, Arnie kind of comes alive in that scene. Like, Arnie is really dialed into that performance as Sergeant Candy. It doesn't make it in the film, it doesn't work in the film, but it feels like that's what Arnie wants to be.

is this funny guy, this funny, you know, governor of California, as he will be, but it really feels like he's trying to soften his image a lot in this film. Because the thing is, right, it's kind of, like, the fact that I was even considered for the film is indicative of, frankly, everything that's wrong with the film. I have a complex relationship with that deleted scene, because I do actually think it's genuinely really funny. Like, it's funnier than anything that made it into the film, but the thing is it worked, like, if somebody was to post that online now as like a Terminator skit, right?

Yeah. It would be funny. As a scene in the film Terminator 3, where a Terminator murders a bunch of children and then proceeds to, like, destroy a woman's life, and then ultimately ends up succeeding in allowing the end of the world to proceed, it's weird. It's really weird.

But like, as a scene in and of itself, it's actually quite good because you get the ridiculous voice and then honestly my favourite beat in that deleted see I encourage people go watch it right because you can get it on you can find it on YouTube my favourite thing is one of the kind of like military bigger said hmm I don't know about that voice

and then this kind of like unassuming guy in glasses just kind of goes we can fix it yeah he's like the IT guy honestly yeah honestly the absolute best beat in that entire thing like it's so funny but like this is not a scene from a terminator film this is like a you know

this is like a college humour skit or a robot chicken skit about a Terminator film. It's weird. It's so weird. But it's frustrating because I do think it is actually genuinely funnier than anything in the film that's meant to be funny. So I remembered that scene and I sought it out before I watched this film because I do remember that scene more than I remember anything else in this film. That's the thing that I remember about this film that's not even in it.

Yeah. So yeah. It is that beat, though. It's just when the guy goes, we can fix it. Yeah. That does work. Yeah, I think that's Terminator 3 rise on the machines.

Not good. End of sentence. Yeah, I mean, that's it. I'm not even going to lead it in with, oh, you know, well, it's not as bad as it's made out to be. It's like, to be honest with you, like anything I said, this is a completely despise. This is a completely dispensable film.

Yeah, really. I've mentioned the three problems I have with it. It's very generic. It's... The tonal whiplash really hurts the film. And it feels incredibly dated in the kind of early 2000s paradigms. As a lot of films around that time do, to be honest. Oh, yeah, yeah.

100%. I don't know. A period of history that is kind of skated over. And yet a lot feels dated because of it. So obviously there is an element of kind of post-9-11 in the nuclear destruction at the end of the film. It's like, oh yeah, America can be hit. America is vulnerable. The entire world can be destroyed.

But it feels very dated in that sense. Yeah. Yeah, it feels a bit like in the context of this franchise, right? Because particularly when we talk about the next film, like it takes a turn in setting and the sort of thing it's trying to do. I think you could actually argue it does that for the entire rest of the series and we'll deal with those individual films when we come to them but I think this is the film that feels the most like we made this because we just felt like we probably should

but we don't really have much of an idea about what ways we want to do but we just feel like we probably should make it because it was such a pain in the arse to get the rights to it it just has that whole feel about it yeah and we think it'll probably make some money so why not Yeah, there's nothing There's no compelling, real,

or more accurately, they don't develop any compelling ideas. Like, it's like I say, I think it hits upon a couple of things around cyber-securing things. I think could have been interesting, but the end of film doesn't really show that much interest in doing anything with it. Yeah, James Cameron described this film in, he said, in one word, great, but revise that opinion down after two-minute Terminator Salvation, where he said his first two films were better than either of the later films. which I think is just a statement of fact.

It just, yeah. True. So, after this, we get Terminator Salvation in 2009, and we'll be covering that on the next episode, next month. That's where I go into Uncharted Territory because I haven't seen any Terminator films after this one. So Terminator Salvation will be new to me, and we will discuss it on the next episode.

coming out next month. Until then, thank you for joining us. Do follow us at take-onecinema.net and on social media. Tell your friends about the show. Let people know. We only spread through word of mouth. I don't mention this enough, but we have references for the show in a Zetaero library.

That is linked in the show notes. So have a look at that if you want to read some of the sources that we've discussed in this episode. but until next time thank you Jim and we'll be back