The edge is a place where you can consider the future. Those are movies, too. In the future of yesterday, we revisit a film about the future and consider the things it tells us about today, tomorrow and yesterday.
The movie: Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, directed by Jonathan Mostow
The future: De Terminator films are, with the exception of Terminator Salvation, more about fighting for the future than living in it. What glimpses of it we get are most bleak: human civilization is being flattened, diminished to punishments by the rogue artificial intelligence Skynet, which takes control of the world’s nuclear care to use in a preemptive strike at its greatest threat: humanity.
A funny peculiarity of this film and the preceding is that although they are mostly in the ‘present’, they did not take place in the year that the films were released. 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day is set in a 1995 version that is mostly meant to feel contemporary. However, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines is set 10 years after that film, a current 2005 virtually indistinguishable from the 2003 in which the film was released. (Except, of course, the killer robots the government is secretly working on.)
That’s the point of these movies: we’re always working on our downfall. Terminator 3 hammers this point harder than most. Arguably the darkest movie in the franchise, Rise of the Machines is about what happens after we deviate from our impending doom, and the answer is that things do not get much better.
At the beginning of Terminator 3, John Connor (Nick Stahl) is not happy about stopping the T-1000 that was sent to assassinate him in 1995, nor is he at peace with the knowledge of the nuclear apocalypse that preceded 1997. prediction did not happen. Instead, he is a burn-out wrestler with the trauma that comes with a life-long preparation for a war that will never come. That is, until it does, in the form of a new Terminator, the TX (Kristanna Loken). Without knowledge of Connor’s whereabouts, Skynet sent the TX on time to assassinate all of Connor’s future lieutenants on the eve of their activation. The survival of John Connor does not prevent disaster – it just puts it off.
“Judgment Day is unavoidable,” says the eponymous Terminator played by Arnold Schwarzenegger Connor when he arrives, sent from the future to protect him and his future wife Kate Brewster (Claire Danes) from the TX. And, despite their best efforts to shut down Skynet, the machine disguised as a man is equal. The end of the movie is mean and final: John and Kate, trapped in a bunker, as nuclear missiles penetrate the world. The future leader of human resistance is not meant to stop Judgment Day, but to survive it.
The past: The road to a third Terminator film was long and turbulent – a combination of rights conflicts, planning and budget conflicts made what seemed like a no-brainer in the 1990s. By the time the film arrived, more than a decade later, the writer / director James Cameron was no longer involved, and the career of star Arnold Schwarzenegger was in a strange silence after the delayed release of his terrorist hunting flop. Additional damage. Two years at the turn of the century, there were no blockbuster films led by one of the biggest stars of the previous decade. Soon he would garner headlines not for films, but for his unlikely and successful gubernatorial campaign, which began shortly thereafter. Terminator 3his release.
In the minds of many, Rise of the Machines was defined by what it lacked: not just Cameron, but everyone else Terminator star next to Schwarzenegger. No Linda Hamilton, who refused to return and was thus killed off-screen. Neither did Edward Furlong, the young actor who played John Connor T2, back – cast but then replaced by the studio due to substance abuse. There is also the matter of the decade between deadlines – a decade in which Terminator 2 was one of the most influential and cited films in history. How do you follow that?
The answer is simple: you do not. Nathan Rabin, writes for The AV Club, claimed that Rise of the Machines is exactly what it is original Terminator was: “a too-low-budget B-movie that became an instant classic. T3, though far from a classic, is an attainable, mercenary sequel that is short on suspense, but surprisingly long on laughs and surprises. ”
Less benevolent readings of the film would say the same thing, but not in such hot terms. AO Scott in The New York Times called it “loud, dumb and obvious”. Most people probably walked somewhere in the middle of the theater, like EW‘s Lisa Schwarzbaum, recognizes the film as unintentional, but still a good time – especially compared to that summer’s other big blockbuster, Ang Lee’s Hulk.
The current: Finally it is Terminator 3The pitch black end that makes it worthwhile now, in 2020. Rise of the Machines is not really interested in stepping on new ground – none of the sequels, with the exception of the real good of 2019 Terminator: Dark Fate really cared to explore things that James Cameron did not do in his first two films – but the futility of her story takes on new meaning in the modern cinematic landscape.
The world ends in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines because it must; without a nuclear holocaust there is none Terminator franchise, nothing to build a sequel. The meanness of its fictional myth is reflected in its signature catchphrases: there is nothing lyrical about the phrase, “I’m coming back.” It’s only remarkable because Schwarzenegger said it, and that he said it in a culture that had idolized its strangeness for decades. And yet it is an important part of the Terminator formula. In Rise of the Machines, Arnold adapts it: she comes back. In other films like Dark Fate, it’s Sarah Conner who says it. And, like the robot that is somehow obsolete like a man does, we stretch an already thin layer of flesh and blood across the machinery of the franchise cinema, and puzzle over how strange it looks and behaved.
You can get many miles of existential fear. However, there are a few new ideas in each given Terminator film, but one, Heil, is a slog to see. Perhaps it is a by-product of narcissism; in the world of the Terminator films, we have to keep pushing, we have to keep innovating to take a bigger piece of the world, to exercise more control over it, to ultimately be the architects of our own extinction. Rise of the Machines claims unintentionally that this is the point: while we seem to see them as humanity dominating, they are movies where we rejoice before the end of the world.
At the time of this writing, there would be two blockbusters – The New Mutants en Tenet – open in theaters that, given the coronavirus pandemic that devastated the United States, would not open. And yet the audience is encouraged by theater chains and actors going back to the cinema, to do something that could hurt her, just to keep the Hollywood machine running. Because keeping that life will always be more important than one person.
Judgment day is indeed inevitable.
