Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)
Directed by Jonathan Mostow
It's been 10 years since John Connor saved Earth from Judgment Day, and he's now living under the radar, steering clear of using anything Skynet can trace. That is, until he encounters T-X, a robotic assassin ordered to finish what T-1000 started. Good thing Connor's former nemesis, the Terminator, is back to aid the now-adult Connor … just like he promised.
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What critics compared Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines to
There has been a lot of speculation about whether he can live up to Cameron's legacy—but we're not talking The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part 2 (1974) here.
There are even, given the gynoid status of the antagonist, elements of Jonathan Mostow’s Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) here.
Happily, any foreboding inspired by the likes of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines or Spider-Man 3 quickly dissipates once West and Goth settle back into their director-muse relationship.
Exploiting the narrative possibilities of time travel on a more vigorous and elaborate scale than its relatively self-enclosed predecessors, “Genisys” effectively returns us to the events of James Cameron’s “The Terminator” (1984), stirs in the buddy-Arnold dynamics of “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (1991), borrows the man-machine-hybrid plot device from McG’s “Terminator Salvation,” and more or less pretends that Jonathan Mostow’s “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines” (2004) never happened (“never happened” being an admittedly unstable concept in this particular universe).
Still, it’s better than “Terminator 3” (or “Terminator Salvation,” if you really want to count that one), and it’s good to see Arnold Schwarzenegger reprise one of his signature roles.
There are some neat ideas, including folding in iconic moments of the first two films in the series in interesting ways, but Terminator: Genisys lacks a suitable villain, a gripping story befitting its supposed status as the true spiritual Terminator 3, and frequently misses the point of what makes the first two, good, Terminator films tick.
Drawing on plot threads from previous movies (particularly 1984’s The Terminator and 2003’s Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines), and incorporating familiar characters played by newly minted actors, Genisys weaves a convoluted (and ultimately nonsensical) time travel story about evil robots from the future who have been manipulating history since the 1970s in order to ensure that a certain event – the robot uprising – occur by a certain date.
Terminator Genisys had an easy task to accomplish: don't turn out like Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines or Terminator Salvation (sequels that didn’t live up to James Cameron’s first two films).
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It’s more Terminator 3 than T2 .
Meanwhile, the President has been taken down to his "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines"-style bunker, as the bad guys (lead by a danger-and-charisma-free Rick Yune from "Ninja Assassin"), including a disaffected former Secret Service agent (Dylan McDermott, clearly one of the few actors who understood what a artless trash heap he was a part of), try to wrestle nuclear codes out of him.
Suffice it to say, this isn’t what fans meant when they demanded more distinctive personalities for the heroic Autobots and evil Decepticons, though it’s hardly a surprise considering Bay’s penchant for trading in rancid types, which extend to Mikaela’s (Fox) mini Decepticon pet who tawks like Joe Pesci, and a college campus littered with female students (including a T3 -lite fembot Decepticon) ready to be the next contestants on Who Wants to Be a Pole-Dancer?
Perhaps most jarring, though, is the cameo by Arnold Schwarzenegger (2003's " Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines "), playing an acquaintance from Ross' past and the head of a competitive mercenary group.