After Terminator 2: Judgement Day revolutionised action cinema and broke box office records on the way, demand was high from audiences and studios for another instalment of the Terminator saga. But with messy rights issues and studio bankruptcies behind the scenes, plus Cameron’s enormous commitment to a certain film about a sinking ship and the very public post-production issues, it seemed as if it might never happen. When it finally did, over a decade had passed, Cameron was not involved, and two of the previous movie’s iconic actors were also absent. Could director Jonathan Mostow really hope to match or even better the legacy of the movie he was following?

It’s funny, having watched Terminator 2 and had the feelings I did, I approached this re-watch with something of a sheepish manner. One of the first reviews I ever wrote in the public domain was of Terminator 3, about which – as an avid Terminator fan at the time – I was very angry. Might I, I asked myself as I sat down to watch it again, owe this movie an apology?

Well, no. Turns out that Rise of the Machines is just as risible as I had always imagined, but it is at least more interesting to talk about why that is than I had previously imagined. In fact, it’s actually downright fascinating to me that a movie which was, at the time of release, the most expensive ever made, can look quite so cheap as it does.

I’m not talking about age either. This isn’t merely the fidelity of sixteen year-old visual FX being subjected to 2019 scrutiny (in fact, the only copy I was able to solicit for the purposes of this piece was on DVD), but instead an unmistakeable patina of low-rent which permeates the whole movie, from sight gags to scripting to ridiculous set pieces. This feels, to all intents and purposes, like someone tried to re-create Terminator 2, but on a television budget.

What makes this feeling even worse is that the film’s script isn’t lacking for some decent ideas. I like the idea that Skynet has not just limited itself to going after the Connors anymore – this makes sense to me. Much as Hamilton (sadly absent and sorely missed here) was a strong backbone to the first two movies, there comes a point, narratively speaking where it becomes ridiculous that the fate of the whole of humanity should rest on the shoulders of one man and his mother. I like too, the potential which lurks beneath the surface of the T-800’s early pronouncement that John and his mother, in the last film’s events, had merely postponed Judgement Day, which is inevitable. There’s something right in the way that idea registers, the idea in a franchise such as this about destiny and potential futures and so on, that something as monumental as Judgement Day is an event which cannot simply be switched off by the actions of mere mortals, and will instead play out at a different time. Destiny as an unstoppable behemoth, diverted but never halted by the meddling of mortal men (and women).

It’s unfortunate then, that beyond this monotone announcement by Schwarzenegger (here unwisely given far too much to say in a part ill-suited to it) the film fails to really explore or develop the idea at all, beyond having John and future wife Kate finding themselves herded into a nuclear fallout shelter just before the bombs drop, fooled into thinking it’s the place where they can stop Skynet. In context, that ending – praised by some as brave – feels just as cheap as everything else the film does and says. Our heroes – who let’s remember are supposedly the Last Shining Hope For Mankind Against the Evil Genius Machines – are fooled by a transparently shallow double cross which makes no sense at all. I guess they were too busy trying to avoid the T-X.

 

 

Here we come to the next issue – this film’s villain. By this point in the franchise, we’d had a giant killer robot clothed in human skin and a slightly smaller but no less lethal one which was made of liquid metal and could imitate anyone it came into contact with, so the logical next step was… a female killer robot which sort of blended elements of the other two but also had the capability to form guns from its limbs. It doesn’t help that model-turned-actress Kristanna Loken, who up to this point had done mostly TV work, is quite so wooden as she is. Lacking the same sort of raw stature and physical presence which helped Schwarzenegger overcome a similar issue in his own debut performance as the T-800, she opts instead for a fixed, slightly cross expression for the entire run time, like a jilted teenager. Where Robert Patrick was able to use his body language and posture to give credence to his smaller frame matching up to that of Schwarzenegger, Loken just looks like someone’s stunt double doing a lot of clever wire work. It likely doesn’t help either that they give her the gimmick of morphing weapons from her hands and using strange nanobot probes to control stuff, but that’s a decision that’s firmly on the script.

And that script takes the issue it’s given itself with its choice of casting for its antagonist and runs with it. Remember the little detail of records being destroyed in the war so that the first terminator had to systematically kill everyone called Sarah Connor in the LA area? Forget it, this one has detailed blood samples and photographic files on all its targets, and it samples DNA by licking stuff because shut up we got a hot girl to play it. And when it gets pulled over by a cop for speeding, it inflates its boobs to distract him because shut up we got a hot girl for the role. And so on, ad nauseum. It really starts to smash through the fourth wall when even the T-800 starts referring to the T-X as ‘her’ instead of ‘it’. Gendered terminators? Really?

But if the antagonist is poor this time around, at least she’s got equally poor heroes to chase after. Nick Stahl hadn’t done a lot of mainstream stuff before Terminator 3 and he hasn’t done a lot of mainstream stuff since either. His take on Connor – here an edgy twenty-something who ‘lives off the grid’ and avoids all human contact lest… I don’t know, he loses his edginess, in a world which he himself believes he has made safe from the threat of a Judgement Day which still haunts his nightmares – is unengaging at best. It’s not all Stahl’s fault – the script writes off the importance of his character in its first act but then can’t quite bring itself to commit, wavering back and forth between him being the actual saviour of humanity and then not again – but his lack of presence and absence of any real charisma doesn’t help.

That they managed to persuade Claire Danes – an actress of not inconsiderable talent who was already doing big things – to play opposite him as love interest-ish to John, Kate Brewster is nothing short of miraculous. And she does her best, but again the script promises much and delivers little. An early hint that she’s one of those people in life who accidentally break all machines just by being around them never gets paid off (or even referred to again) is just one of the examples of a script which was likely sold to Danes on the early pages and then left her locked in when she read the rest. She gets a fiancé who may as well have a ticking timeclock counting down to when he will inevitably be removed from the picture and about whom she doesn’t seem to have much feeling even before he dies. She happens to know (and have made out with) John at school, just before he disappeared (blowing up Skynet and such) and they are reunited here through the most million to one chance. She fairly quickly passively accepts the things going on around her and then at the end she gets this odd ‘mini Sarah Connor’ moment (which the script can’t even let her just have bopping it squarely on the nose with a ‘You remind me of my mother’ comment from John, and then she just goes back to being dragged along for the ride, ending up in the bunker at the end with John having taken not one single second to mourn her dead fiancé and not much more time to think on her father who actually died in front of her mere minutes earlier.

And then, there’s Arnie. It’s fairly obvious even by this point that the man is a little too old to be doing this, and that he’s mainly there to pick up the pay check. The script unwisely appears to think that what we really need is more deadpan Arnie humour, but the problem is that the manner and tone of Schwarzenegger’s delivery lend themselves to very particular types of writing, and the character he’s playing even more so, and the scriptwriters here don’t have that writing in their skillset. It starts badly when we have the opening scene of him walking into a bar and accosting a gay stripper for his clothes, with the attendant glittery sunglasses, and it just goes downhill from there. Every scene plays like a bunch of guys sat in a room and said ‘Remember *scene* from T2? Like that, but funnier!’ The opener forcibly recalls the opening scene for the character in T2. The chase through the streets on a motorcycle after a truck recalls the similar scene in T2, the walk through the graveyard hefting a coffin and firing a massive cannon at police cars while avoiding killing anyone (with the same repeated gag of 0.0 casualties) recalls… well, you get the drift. It doesn’t have any original ideas of its own, which was part of the issue with T2 which Cameron covered over with stunning shots and a cracking script. Here though, it just feels like a poor garage band doing covers of your favourite top 10 group – all the wrong notes, none of the delivery or flair.

It all adds up to a surprisingly muddled and disappointing package. It does, as I’ve said, have some interesting ideas lurking in there, but it doesn’t know what to do with them and ends up discarding every one in favour of just repeating what we’ve seen before. Even the ending, which is at least brave to the extent that it’s a bit of a bummer, feels cheap and unearned when it’s set against the preceding two hours of sight gags, lame quips and uneven scripting (why is the T-800 possessed of detailed files on human psychology but has such yawning gaps in its understanding of basic human behaviour?).

I don’t feel angry at it, like I once did, just like it’s the most diminishing of returns already, feeling more like an eighth or ninth sequel to an idea that should have already been put out to pasture that’s released straight to video rather than a multimillion dollar third instalment.