___ ___ ___ ____ __ _____ __ ____ __ / __\ /__ \ /__ \ / __// | / /__ \ / / / / |/ | / /_/ // \ \// \ \/ /_ / /||/ // \ \/ / / / /| /| | / __ // / // / / __// / | // / / / / / / |/ | | / / / //___/ //___/ / /__/ / / //___/ / /__/ / / | | /_/ /_/______/______/____/_/ /_/______/\_____/_/ TEXTFILES ---------------------------------------------------------------------- #97 : Saturday 19 July 2003 : http://addendumtextfiles.org ---------------------------------------------------------------------- We went to see T3, by Steak ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines opened across Australia the night before last. So in true science fiction fan fashion Spud and I gave the car ‘Ham’ a good kick in the rear differential, pulled it’s choke and made our way to the local cess-pit of all satanic influence, Knox city. It took me a little while to convince spud that today, we shouldn’t just mallrat but go see this movie. He was all in for it, except he wanted to see it on Friday. Now I know for a fact that opening night is the best time to see a movie, don't ask me why, it just is. So I had to do a little smooth talking to get him fully into the idea, but once he had been suitably brainwashed, I mean persuaded, to part with his $13.50 we were happily on our way up the escalator towards the seemingly infinite corridor of cinemas. "Let’s take the lazy way up today," he said, remembering our escapades on the staircase the last time we were here I nodded in agreement, noticing the looks of displeasure from the patrons in front of us, who had just been called lazy. I handed my ticket to the ticket lady and she told us that we were in cinema one. We were to go around and behind her to a little door off to the side. When I saw the shitty looking door and lack of overstated DOLBY signs I instantly thought that we had been defaulted into a tiny little cinema. One that was perhaps added onto the rest of the complex at the last minute of the building process just to facilitate the arrival of even more of our money. How wrong I was. As far as cinemas go this one was fucking massive and by massive I mean extremely Godzilla size huge. It was easily three or four times the size of the cinemas we had watched ‘Star Trek: Nemesis’ and ‘The Matrix Reloaded’ in. Advertisements played, the lights dimmed, more advertisements, then more light dimming, then finally the trailers, followed (at last) by the main feature. I’m not really all that sure what to make of the movie. I know for a fact that it left me disappointed, but at the same time slightly satisfied. It’s hard to explain, I have no doubt that, over time I will be able to find the proper place for this movie in my mind around it’s two older siblings but for now the whole experience seems to be a little bit lost. That’s not to say that the film wasn’t enjoyable, it was, you just had to stick your brain into neutral and let it freewheel into entertaining you, it didn’t require a whole lot of thought. Then again it could have just been the fact that it was a terminator movie. It’s hard to make a horribly bad movie when terminators are involved, unfortunately this movie ended up coming a lot closer than might have been necessary. In my mind there is a high possibility that everyone involved in the script-writing and green-lighting process was so high on coke that they thought that having the terminator dead-pan remark on the blisteringly obvious, not just once but continually throughout the movie would be really funny. In short the entire dialog seemed very stilted and non-serious. The film had a sort of a comic book style to it that didn’t really suit the franchise at all. The first two installments were real science fiction action movies. Throughout both of them you really believed the characters were in danger and that the enemy that was chasing them could strike at any moment. They were fighting to the absolute bitter end, to the very last round. I mean at the end of T2, who wasn’t expecting Sarah Conner, upon running out of shells, to actually throw the empty shotgun at the T1000 to deliver the final push that was needed to send the infernal machine into the molten depths below? - I defiantly did. This movie tried far too hard to accomplish this same sense of suspense and peril. As you might expect, it didn’t work. The TX wasn’t nearly menacing enough, she just didn’t have the right edge that Arnie and Patrick had in the previous movies. They tried to make her more menacing in a number of extremely obvious ways, first they made her stronger than Arnold, which was in theory meant to make you look twice at her abilities, but on film just looked stupid. A super model thin women smashing a super weightlifter around? I don’t think I can suspend my disbelief that much, I’m sorry.. They gave her some uber-powerful-gun/hand attachments that could trigger Hollywood explosive charges and CGI effects on cue, they also made it so that she could control other machinery, like cars, early terminators and other useful things like that. This all made it seem that they were being chased by something out of a Marvel comic book. They also made her POV blue. The T1000 never had a POV, you got the impression that he just knew what was going on all the time, there was no need for this terminator to have a POV, it was just used so that they could advance the plot easily and without much hassle or thought. Which brings me to the T800’s POV. In the first movie he was given meaningless but aesthetically pleasing bits of random C code to spew out at the audience, in the second film they managed to replicate this pretty well. But in this movie his POV looks like a bad ‘macromedia’ flash animation. Flashing up words and phrases like ‘Inappropriate’ and ‘Code: terminate’ to get a cheap laugh and to make sure that the clueless members of the audience knew what was going on respectively. I also feel that this review would not be complete without mentioning the fact that this movie has the worst one liners in cinematic history. The fact that most of the audience laughed at all of these sad excuses for sentences makes me weep for the future, it really does. They ALL should have been cut out, and none of them should have made it onto the deleted scenes on the DVD. How the hell they made it into the theatrical cut of the film I will never know. I mean how can they leave out the head-opening scene in T2 but include the terminator saying, "talk to the hand" in T3? Terminators just aren’t meant to say that, are they? In conclusion, THEY have again taken one of my favorite all time movies and almost but not quite ruined it completely. Turning it into a fan-boy-adolescent-teenage-male-with-the-IQ-of-my-remote-control- orientated-poor-excuse-for-an-action-flick. I made that phrase up, you can tell can’t you? In my opinion the two only saving graces of the entire film was Nick Stahl’s portrayal of the late twenty’s John Conner which could have been better utilized in a better version of this film. That and Arnold’s CGI makeup at the end of the film that finally doesn’t look like it’s just some piece of plastic stuck on the side of his face. (Something tells me he really didn’t want to spend a collective nine days in the makeup chair again like he did for T2) What ever I say you’ll probably go see it anyway, you might enjoy it, if you like that kind of thing. But if your looking for a continuation of the previous two movies then in my view you’ll leave the cinema feeling like you’ve been given your birthday cake, only it tasted like dog shit. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Disclamer - This content of this issue of Addendum is copyrighted the respective author whose name or handle should appear at the top of this page. You may copy this textfile but please keep it in its original configuration. Please note that the views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of addendum as a whole. Thankyou. ----------------------------------------------------------------------