Are you ready for "Serenity"?

[Bolty]

T3 was not so bad. It was no T2, but then again nothing is.[right][snapback]90621[/snapback][/right]

It was odd for me watching T3. I kept saying "I'm sure the good part is coming any time now." Had a chuckle during the whole 'huge truck with crane smashing through everything' because it was so over-the-top gratuitous, and laughed some when the psychiatrist from T1/T2 had his short bit seeing Ahnult again in T3 and freaking out.

But that was about it. That's all I remember from the flick. Just lots of violence with nothing interesting.

I just looked it up on RottenTomatoes and noted that it got a favorable rating, which surprised me. Then I found Roger Ebert's review of T3 which pointed out, in much better terms, what I was thinking watching T3 and wishing they never bothered making it:

The first two Terminator movies, especially the second...played elegantly with the paradoxes of time travel, in films where the action scenes were necessary to the convoluted plot. There was actual poignancy in the dilemma of John Connor, responsible for a world that did not even yet exist. The robot Terminator, reprogrammed by Connor, provided an opportunity to exploit Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics.

"Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines" is made in the spirit of...slick new action thrillers, and abandons its own tradition to provide wall-to-wall action in what is essentially one long chase and fight, punctuated by comic, campy or simplistic dialogue...The time-based paradoxes are used arbitrarily and sometimes confusingly, and lead to an enormous question at the end: How, if that is what happens, are the computer-based machines of the near future created? Perhaps because the plot is thinner and more superficial, the characters don't have the same impact, either.

The ending must remain for you to discover, but I will say it seems perfunctory--more like a plot development than a denouement in the history of humanity. The movie cares so exclusively about its handful of characters that what happens to them is of supreme importance, and the planet is merely a backdrop.

No one can call T2 a "cerebral" movie, but much like "The Matrix" it wasn't just "here's some action with cool futuristic thingies, isn't that swell?" That's all T3 wound up being and it made it such a disappointment. I hate it when people call movies like that "SciFi." The "Science" is just another method to cause explosions.

-Bolty