Terminator 3: A Creatively-Void Cash Grab

Luke Johansen
May 23
3 min read

A robotic killing machine is commissioned to hunt down and kill a very special and entirely-unaware target on Earth, and the only thing standing between John Connor and certain death is a reprogrammed Terminator sent back in time to oppose the schemes of its original creators. Does this premise sound familiar to you? That might be because I just described both Terminator 2: Judgement Day and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines in the same sentence. One of these movies is a subversive and extremely well-paced action thriller that has been rightfully enshrined in action cinema history, and the other is a virtual carbon copy of two much better movies, a sequel better off forgotten. Terminator 3 is an all-too familiar casualty of low-effort franchise filmmaking, the type of movie that tries to cash in on a familiar and beloved IP without bothering to either attempt anything creatively noteworthy or understand what truly made the franchise it badly emulates so special in the first place. And while this might be petty of me to say, this long-time video editor was pained to see that the editors of the visually ugly Terminator 3 didn't even bother to learn good color grading.

Much of Rise of the Machines is a lazy hybrid of the first two Terminator films, even featuring a Terminatrix - a female Terminator - killing everyone named John Connor à la The Terminator on top of a good Terminator sent back in time to stop her from carrying out this mission of death, a nearly identical imitation of the plot twist from Judgement Day. Rise of the Machines suffers from an acute lack of creativity or originality, a jarring sight to see in a franchise that had in many ways become synonymous with inventiveness. Its big shootout and chase setpieces play like a "greatest hits" of the previous two movies, and not in a good way. I wondered if or when Rise of the Machines would attempt to do or say anything new, and there aren't many ways for me to say this other than that it simply didn't.

Rise of the Machines plays less like the experiments in filmmaking that its either suspenseful and noir-driven or subversive and action-packed predecessors were, and more like a studio obligation trying to capitalize on familiar tropes. There's no meaningful effort here to interpret the franchise in any notably fresh way - only to copy what came before. And to be fair to Terminator 3, not everything about it is bad. Rise of the Machines certainly features some machines rising, and I liked how its story eventually escalated from one to one hundred in some pretty shocking ways. Due to the name of this movie and the foundations of its franchise, it's probably not much of a spoiler for me to say that some nuclear weapons get launched, and some of the comparably trivial yet undeniably impactful details surrounding this nuclear holocaust work very well. But again, when you're building on a shaky foundation, a couple of lovely outdoor sconce lights don't do much to make an eventual foundational collapse look a little bit prettier.

Rise of the Machines was given the unenviable and even near-impossible task of trying to follow in the footsteps of two predecessors that are as phenomenally written as they are undeniably distinct from each other, and it takes on this unhappy persona of being too similar to what came before to make any real impression on me. It lacks any tangible vision or creativity and doesn't seem to have a passion to do anything other than rake in the cash. And while it's not a total loss, the characterization in this movie - a big selling point of both The Terminator and Judgement Day - is a considerable step down in Rise of the Machines. John, Kate, and the Terminatrix aren't as interesting, layered, or well-acted as their forerunners in a way that glows as green as a millionaire's fat wallet.