Where we left it last Saturday, John, Kate, and the Terminator were rushing to a military base to ask Kate’s dad to help them prevent Skynet from launching nuclear Armageddon. There isn’t much time left. Skynet is set to launch its attack in only a few hours.

But unbeknownst to our heroes…

… the T-X is already at the military base. Apparently, it’s given up on hunting down John and Kate and has opted to kill Kate’s father instead. But first, it goes into another area of the base and hacks the machines, ordering them to attack at the proper time.

Meanwhile, Kate’s dad, Robert Brewster, is receiving orders from the Pentagon. Throughout the film, there have been vague mutterings about a virus taking over the civilian and military computers. Things have reached a critical point, so the Pentagon wants Kate’s dad to upload Skynet—which is now a form of software—into the military computers to destroy the virus. Kate’s dad is reluctant to do this because Skynet is yet untested, but he complies with the order. He uploads Skynet, and sure enough, the evil computer program takes everything over.

Then the T-X arrives disguised as Kate. The Terminator shows up with John and Kate behind him but isn’t quite fast enough. The T-X fires several shots into Kate’s dad before the Terminator shoots her, knocking her down a shaft in the building.

But what is Skynet?

When John and Kate reach Kate’s wounded dad and begin to explain the situation, John says something odd. He says that Skynet is the virus taking over everything, which doesn’t make any sense. We’ve been given to understand that Skynet is a form of untested software, which should mean that the virus taking everything over is unconnected to Skynet. If the virus is its own unique program, how can Skynet also be the virus?

That’s just an offhand comment from John in the midst of a crisis, but I felt it showed that the writers didn’t really care how Skynet took over. They just wanted to create a situation where the T-800 and the T-X would fight.

I understand the impulse, but as I’ve said before, tension is tied to stakes, and stakes are tied to a clear comprehension of the plot. In order for the audience to be invested in the action, they have to understand what’s going on. Such offhanded comments confuse people and make the movie hard to follow, which will typically cause people to check out, even if there are a lot of explosions and action on screen.

Anyway, the robots that the T-X has hacked start shooting everyone, and Kate’s dad tells John and Kate to go to his office to find a book filled with codes. The trio picks up the wounded father and takes him to his office, where he shows them the codes and tells them they need to fly to another base called Crystal Peak. But when John asks him if this base is where they will find Skynet, Kate’s dad simply says that it’s their best chance, which seems to mean no. But John doesn’t realize that.

The Terminator vs. T-X

Kate’s father dies, and the Terminator, John, and Kate must fight their way through a bunch of machines. The Terminator and the T-X have another face-off, and Kate ends up killing a flying drone.

Then John tells Kate that she reminds him of his mother, which, first of all, warrants an eye roll, given that John and Kate are going to end up married, which is very Freudian and, therefore, weird.

As for the Terminator, he loses his fight with the T-X, but rather than killing him, she hacks him so he’ll kill John instead. I don’t know why she didn’t order him to kill Kate, since she’s the new key to everything, but anyway…

The T-X then tracks John and Kate down, but John realizes that one of the machines in the base is a giant magnet and turns it on. The T-X sticks to it, and the two are able to escape. How did John know that the machine was a magnet? Don’t know! What’s a giant magnet doing in a military base? No idea! But anyway! Moving on! The plot’s gotta happen.

John and Kate reach a hangar and run to Kate’s father’s plane. It turns out she knows how to fly it, and the two enter the aircraft. But then the Terminator shows up, pulls John out of the plane, and tries to kill him. Thankfully, the Terminator’s original programming and the T-X’s new programming give the robot an existential crisis, and he ends up smashing a car instead. The Terminator shuts down, and John and Kate fly to Crystal Peak.

Once at Crystal Peak, the two run through a handful of codes to unlock a giant door, but then the T-X shows up again. How did it escape the giant magnet? Well, the movie shows her starting to hack at it with a saw that was conveniently inside her mechanical arm, but I’m not sure how that would’ve helped her. How did she know where to find John and Kate? I have no idea.

Thankfully, the Terminator turned back on and comes crashing into the hangar with a large aircraft that runs over the T-X. He knew where John and Kate were heading, so this at least makes sense.

Then, for no reason whatsoever, the giant doors John and Kate had just opened start to close again, and the Terminator has to hold them open. He throws himself under the giant doors to keep them from closing and has John and Kate crawl through the crack. At the same time, the T-X crawls out from under the ruined aircraft but it has been cut in half. It begins crawling towards John and Kate, but once it reaches the doors, the Terminator holds it back, then pulls out one of his fuel cells—which causes those cells to blow up for some reason—and shoves it into the T-X’s mouth. The two robots blow up, and the debris seals Kate and John inside the mountain base.

Crystal Peak is not what it seems

John and Kate rush into the base only to find out that Skynet isn’t there. Kate’s dad lied. Crystal Peak is really a fallout shelter for the country’s leaders, but the leaders never made it.

The radio starts to broadcast. Soldiers are screaming for help because they have no idea what’s going on. John reluctantly answers the queries, and when a soldier asks who’s in charge, he says he is. After a short monologue from John, the movie ends.

For all this film’s problems, I did like the ending. Kate’s father’s decision to lie made sense. He knew that there was no way to stop Skynet once it was uploaded, but he couldn’t afford to say that to Kate and John. So he did the best he could.

The scene where John accepts his role as humanity’s leader against the machines was actually moving. This movie is like a gymnast stumbling through a routine only to stick the landing. Is it good? Absolutely not. Does it ruin the franchise? Yes and no.

On the one hand, the flaws are mainly the result of lazy writing, mostly to move the characters to where they need to go—sloppy, unfocused, but not lore-killing, and these flaws do save time if nothing else.

Time travel issues weakened the franchise

The choice to abandon the time loop and replace it with a fatalistic version of time travel is the single decision that killed the franchise. Personally, I like fatalistic versions of time travel. For one thing, they suggest the existence of God and imply a plan. They also create scenarios where a writer can have the same outcome happen in a variety of different ways, which makes for some interesting stories.

But the idea didn’t work here because the word fate became a ticket for the writers to ignore continuity and do whatever they wanted. It’s fine to play with the idea of fate in a time travel tale, but the writer must work within the set-up given by the prior stories; otherwise, there are no stakes because the writers can flip the chessboard at a moment’s notice. I would’ve preferred the writers to explain how Skynet came into being again. I would’ve liked to have seen an exploration into what John and Sarah changed and what they didn’t. I would’ve liked to have seen Sarah react to the fact that she couldn’t change her fate after all and then choose to become a hero.

But really, when considering what the first two Terminator movies were about, the words “no fate,” are the issue. Agree with it or not, Kyle’s Reese’s words, “no fate” were the message, and to casually shrug that message off was an insult to the people who wrote the previous films. Such a rebuttal needed to be more thought out. This movie wasn’t enough to kill the franchise by itself, but it was an omen of things to come.          

Next Saturday, I am starting on Terminator: Salvation (2009). See you then!

Here are the first three parts of my review: Terminator 3: A Troubled Movie That’s Hard to Find Here’s an odd little problem I encountered while preparing for this review: Difficulty even finding the movie in order to review it! Portraying John as a sort of nomad was overall a good plot device because the T-X can’t find him. So, she begins killing apparently random people.

Terminator 3: Was It All Fate or Contrivance? It turns out that the T-X isn’t looking for John, as we might expect, but for Kate. Despite puzzling sequences, there is a thread of logic that keeps the franchise from becoming too complicated as the story continues.

and

Terminator 3 Review Part 3: Are We Looking at a New Sarah Connor? What made Sarah’s character work was her start as a simple waitress who turns into a strong, resourceful warrior. Can John pick up where she left off? The problem with time travel stories is that dropped plot points and forgotten predictions add up and new additions to the story forget the older ones.