Terminator 3 - Late to the Party

I don't think anyone will argue with that.

1 - agreed, for a big FX movie it seemed a little skimpy on the bg fx
2 - don't necessarily agree, maybe the theme was no matter how hard you try you can't avoid destiny, no matter what happens in any of the movies the end result doesn't change, the machines take over an Conner leads the resistance.
3 - Maybe she was trying not to stand out?
4 - the human casualties answer is easy, it would be part of his new programming, yeah the key thing didn't fit.
5 - I think the skynet program mutated into the virus.
6 - meh

This new Arnold unit was reprogrammed by Claire Danes to assist them in the present. John presumably talked with his wife about his experience with Arnold 2.0, and about the things he was able to learn, like not killing anyone and to check the visor for the car keys before attempting a hotwire. These behaviors were then programmed into Arnold 3.0.

About the future/fate issue, I think the theory that the movie clings to is that certain things are fated to happen, and the future acts like a rubber band. You can change it to a degree, but it'll adapt and always try to return to its natural state. That's why Skynet and Judgement Day still happened, but much later than the original date stated in T2.

I thought this was a good, solid action flick. To me, T3 was an automatic homerun by the very nature that it didn't suck. I wish they could have kept Edward Furlong though. The ending was brilliant.

I think the reason it cost so much was Arnold's paycheck (obviously), and Warner Bros. had to obtain the rights to the franchise, which at the time I believe belonged to several different people and companies. Everyone connected wanted their share of the pie.

I'm usualy not one for seeing movies get past the third treatment, but I'd love to see a T4 set after Judjement Day, culminating in John Connor sendng his best friend back in tme to save his mother (and n effect become his father) I think it would be a nice wrapping on the franchise.

Go with him if you want to live.

James Cameron was sadly missed on this film.
It was an OK action film, but not in the same galaxy of quality as the first two films.

Am I the only person who fucking LOATHES T2?

Does no one else remember how Cameron totally nuetered one of the all-time-great movie badasses?

Witness the terminator hopping on one leg! I'm suprised he doesn't cluck like a chicken too.

And the worst of this Arnold-one-liner-groan-a-thon, action-movie-for-13-yr-old-girls, piece-of-crap is this line:

"Now I know why you cry"

Give me a fucking break! Pussy!

"That Terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."

That's the best line in The Terminator, and the main reason it works so well. Arnold is completely without conscience, and has only one thing on his mind – to track down Sarah Connor and kill her – and he keeps on coming, no matter what. And, since he doesn't know which Sarah Connor he's looking for, he shoots his way through the names in the phone book until he finds the right woman!

The Terminator was one of the last really scary characters in cinema. And watching him gun down multiple innocent people in his pursuit gives the film a take-no-prisoners quality that grounds it in gritty reality, despite being a time travel story (though, a good one). T2 may have looked better, but it failed to recapture the efficient simplicity of the first one.

The only redeeming aspect of T2 is the way they chose to write Linda Hamilton's part, as a borderline pyschotic, nearly driven mad by her knowledge of the future...if only the rest of the movie had followed that line of thinking into hard "R" territory instead of pussing out. T2 is almost as family friendly as a Disney film.

There, I've vented!

1) The high cost of the fim is due to salaries. Arnold's alone was probably 20 mil.

2) If you go back to T1, Reece's job is to protect Sarah, and therefore John, from getting killed -- not to stop Judgment Day. It was Sarah in T2 who came up with the "No fate but the one we make" mantra. There was no evidence given to support the theory that Judgement Day could be stopped. We just believed so because Sarah believed so.

3) Terminators are designed to look like humans and blend in. The older version (Arnold) didn't do that so well. I think they wanted to show the Terminatrix acting like a real woman would. That said, this is one of my gripes with the film. A Terminator shouldn't ask for things, it should take them.

4) This is explained in the film. Kate reprograms him based on stories John told her in the future.

5) Skynet.

6) Moscow didn't get the rights to the theme music. If you listen again, the end credits isn't even the real Terminator theme.

Yeah, this part is iffy to me as well. The way I see it, Skynet is the defense program (hardware and software) that the Defense Department was using. Skynet was in use for some time prior to the starting of the film, but was manned by humans. At some point, Skynet became self-aware (this was not shown in the movie) and created the virus in order to set the stage for the Defense Dept. to put Skynet on autopilot (cutting humans out of the mix so they couldn't pull the plug).

Uh... did you fall asleep during the T-1000's scenes?

I haven't seen the movie in awhile. I do remember Arnold describing what happened, but it remains foggy. Care to expound?

Oh, I was talking to Mr I-Hate-T2 above you.

Yes, they look nice. But I never said it was a boring movie, just a bad one.

Oh, okay. In any case, this thread intrigued me enough to pop in my T3 DVD and watch certain scenes with subtitles.

Arnold tells Kate and John that Robert Brewster "works for CRS -- Cyber Research Systems, autonomous weapons division. Skynet is one of the digital defense systems developed under Brewster." In the same scene, Arnold goes on to say that "Skynet is assuming control over global communications in preparation for its attack" which we learn is to take place 3 hours from then. So at some point not shown in the film, Skynet already had become self-aware.

Later at Dept. of Defense, Robert Brewster is told that a virus has taken over all the defense computers. "The virus keeps growing and changing. It has a mind of its own" (emphasis mine). Skynet was setting up the Defense Dept. to turn the Skynet program to autopilot. Once Brewster did that, Skynet initiated the nukes and humans had no control over the program to stop it.

I'm a pretty big fan of the film, but the music answer simply isn't true. It wasn't a rights issue -- Beltrami simply thought the theme didn't fit into the film, and Mostow agreed. If they didn't have the rights to the music (which they most certainly did), the remixed version wouldn't be able to play during the end credits. Still, while I missed the theme, I also remember it also played a grand total of two times in Terminator 2.

And the Kate bit is iffy. All the Terminator say is that it was Brewster who had him reprogrammed and sent back through time, not that she changed his personality based on stories told by John. But I guess I could buy that.

You could be right on the music front, but I distinctly remember reading an article that Moscow didn't have the rights. I remember plenty of Terminatior music in T2. Not just the swelling theme music, but the mechanical, drumlike sounds whenever the Terminator appeared.

I don't remember it word for word, but John says something to the effect of "Do you even remember me? I'm gonna have to teach you everything all over again." Arnold replies that he was not the same Terminator, but Skynet selected him for the emotional attachment John had for his model # due to his boyhood experiences. That helped him infiltrate the Resisitence to kill John after which Kate reprogrammed him and sent him back in time. I guess they don't specifically say that she reprogrammed his personality, but in the context of the story, its the only logical explaination.

The theme played more than twice in T2. Unless you're not counting credits. I missed Arnie's pounding old theme, too. But then, I've always been less than thrilled with Beltrami as a composer. He always seems incredibly generic.

T3 on its own is an averagely fun dumb action movie, despite its ending. The only problem is, its prequels weren't dumb action movies. It's almost the equivalent of REVENGE OF THE SITH - reasonably enjoyable on its own merits, but not intelligent or well-produced enough to stand next to the originals.

[QUOTE=Dannychico]2) Didn't they eliminate sequel possibilities in the 2nd movie? Arnie says "You didn't prevent Judgment Day, only postponed it." Sounds like B.S. to me. Doesn't this contradict the whole thematic spine of the movies, that the future is not set?

Nope. In the first film, time is a loop, especially if you factor in (and it feels like they do) the scenes Cameron cuts for the flow of the narrative, like the deleted scene after the big factory fight where we find out that the plant was Cyberdyne, and you see two techs discover the leftover parts from the crusher, suggesting (like shown in the second film) that Skynet couldn't have been born if it didn't send a Terminator back.
In fact, timeline-wise, the reason it sends two terminators back is to create itself with the first one, and then change history with the second...the first wasn't supposed to actually kill Sarah, just set itself up. The second one was the real ploy to kill John, and change the future...only it changed in another way, and got Cyberdyne blown up. Oops.
If we want to get into timestream splits, it's quite possible that it was John himself that is responsible for the defining moment that led to the specific timestream split, when he stops Sarah from killing Dyson. The events following that one action lead to Cyberdyne's destruction.
However, and I'm suprised this was never actually brought up in T3, because it's a popular theory and would have explained things nicely, there isn't a tech company around that doesn't have offsite backups. Dyson may have died, his work unfinished, but as he said, they were THIS close to cracking it...and others could have extrapolated from the offsite backups.
So, Skynet gets created...later. Similiar in design, but still not the same Skynet as before. Now we have a new model on our hand, with access to slightly higher levels of technology when it starts the war. Same problems, new rules...

In the theatrical release, yes. However, there was a scene (my favorite, so of course it got cut...can't have those character moments surviving!) where Reese winds up pointing a gun at Sarah and almost killing her. In this scene, he talks about there being No Fate But What We Make (IIRC, they actually mention this scene in T2, when John finds the message No Fate carved into the table, saying that his future self made Reese memorize that to tell Sarah)

I couldn't agree more.

I haven't seen the movie in some time, so just to clarify - In T3, skynet has absolutely nothing to do with the future cyberdyne's technology/hardware, but is merely some piece of software (written in the present) that manages to become selfaware? That's kinda the impression I got at the end.