Your clothes. Gif them to me.
Jul. 26th, 2003 07:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyWent to see Terminator 3 with Mirrorthaw this afternoon.
Capsule review: Big silly movie sadly lacking in Linda Hamilton.
For context, I have seen both The Terminator and Terminator 2. I think T2 may be the best movie of the three, but that's partly because it's working such brilliant twists on the original--i.e., if The Terminator weren't as good as it is, T2 couldn't top it.
T3 was disappointing for several reasons, none of which were named Arnold Schwarzenegger or Kristanna Loken. The biggest one for me was, sadly, Claire Danes. She is the absolute best thing Romeo + Juliet has going for it, and even though I can't watch that movie any longer, I remember her performance with both clarity and immense fondness. But T3 ... *sigh* Let it be said, first and foremost, that she had a shit role and some unbelievably thankless lines--and with the shadow of Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor looming over the whole thing, that's not something the movie should have slacked off on. Danes is remarkable in R+J for a kind of glowing ingenue quality, which, okay, yes, is partly because she was in fact seventeen, but just also in her relationship with the camera. She doesn't have that here, but it hasn't been replaced with anything else.
Also, she and Nick Stahl? No chemistry. Possibly negative chemistry. It's clear that Kate and John will be procreating ONLY to continue the human race. And possibly by artificial insemination.
Nick Stahl also fails to win me over. Partly this is because, like David Duchovny, he should not be allowed to do voice-overs, for his own sake as much as for anyone else's. Partly, it's just that he doesn't have the charisma to carry a movie this heavy this far.
Mirrorthaw and I were agreeing on the way back that, while The Terminator is mostly Linda Hamilton's movie (not because Schwarzenegger isn't grand, but because the T-100 in that movie is only an antagonist, not a character), the weight of T2 is fairly evenly divided between Hamilton, Schwarzenegger, and the seraphic Robert Patrick (who was, all by himself, the reason I kept watching Season 8 of The X-Files even when it was clear the series was turning to shit before my very eyes--oh the crush I had on Doggett! It was neon green and the size of Rhode Island). But T3 doesn't have the strong female lead, the T-100 has less to do, and while the TX is an excellent antagonist, she's not a character ... and she's not as scary as the T-1000.
Which leads me to the real reason for disappointment with T3. No innovation. The brilliance of T2 is in the T-1000 and the horrifying new twist it brings to the basic scenario. But the TX is nothing but the T-1000 with a couple new features; she doesn't have the sheer terrifying UNKNOWNNESS that the T-1000 did (I remember vividly the cold clutch of horror the first time I watched the T-1000 regenerating itself--it doesn't have the same punch with the TX because we've seen it before) and frankly, she's not as hard to kill. T3 has exactly the same plot as T2, only with a girlfriend substituted for a mother and some new sets. T2 is a genuine innovation on The Terminator. T3 is nothing but a sequel to T2.
It was fun. I don't regret those two hours of my live (as opposed to the two hours I spent watching The Italian Job--see my bitter review from a couple weeks back). But it was nothing but a big silly summer movie, and I would have liked it better if I could have gotten to see Linda Hamilton kicking ass.
Capsule review: Big silly movie sadly lacking in Linda Hamilton.
For context, I have seen both The Terminator and Terminator 2. I think T2 may be the best movie of the three, but that's partly because it's working such brilliant twists on the original--i.e., if The Terminator weren't as good as it is, T2 couldn't top it.
T3 was disappointing for several reasons, none of which were named Arnold Schwarzenegger or Kristanna Loken. The biggest one for me was, sadly, Claire Danes. She is the absolute best thing Romeo + Juliet has going for it, and even though I can't watch that movie any longer, I remember her performance with both clarity and immense fondness. But T3 ... *sigh* Let it be said, first and foremost, that she had a shit role and some unbelievably thankless lines--and with the shadow of Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor looming over the whole thing, that's not something the movie should have slacked off on. Danes is remarkable in R+J for a kind of glowing ingenue quality, which, okay, yes, is partly because she was in fact seventeen, but just also in her relationship with the camera. She doesn't have that here, but it hasn't been replaced with anything else.
Also, she and Nick Stahl? No chemistry. Possibly negative chemistry. It's clear that Kate and John will be procreating ONLY to continue the human race. And possibly by artificial insemination.
Nick Stahl also fails to win me over. Partly this is because, like David Duchovny, he should not be allowed to do voice-overs, for his own sake as much as for anyone else's. Partly, it's just that he doesn't have the charisma to carry a movie this heavy this far.
Mirrorthaw and I were agreeing on the way back that, while The Terminator is mostly Linda Hamilton's movie (not because Schwarzenegger isn't grand, but because the T-100 in that movie is only an antagonist, not a character), the weight of T2 is fairly evenly divided between Hamilton, Schwarzenegger, and the seraphic Robert Patrick (who was, all by himself, the reason I kept watching Season 8 of The X-Files even when it was clear the series was turning to shit before my very eyes--oh the crush I had on Doggett! It was neon green and the size of Rhode Island). But T3 doesn't have the strong female lead, the T-100 has less to do, and while the TX is an excellent antagonist, she's not a character ... and she's not as scary as the T-1000.
Which leads me to the real reason for disappointment with T3. No innovation. The brilliance of T2 is in the T-1000 and the horrifying new twist it brings to the basic scenario. But the TX is nothing but the T-1000 with a couple new features; she doesn't have the sheer terrifying UNKNOWNNESS that the T-1000 did (I remember vividly the cold clutch of horror the first time I watched the T-1000 regenerating itself--it doesn't have the same punch with the TX because we've seen it before) and frankly, she's not as hard to kill. T3 has exactly the same plot as T2, only with a girlfriend substituted for a mother and some new sets. T2 is a genuine innovation on The Terminator. T3 is nothing but a sequel to T2.
It was fun. I don't regret those two hours of my live (as opposed to the two hours I spent watching The Italian Job--see my bitter review from a couple weeks back). But it was nothing but a big silly summer movie, and I would have liked it better if I could have gotten to see Linda Hamilton kicking ass.
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no subject
Date: 2003-07-27 02:39 am (UTC)Someone went overtime on the foley work though. Yow.
I felt the ending redeemed much of the movie for me, and it was a pretty bold one for Hollywood. The overall message dramatically contradicted the "No fate but what we make" ethos of T2, though.
I probably won't catch it in the theater again, but it'd be worth taping off cable for the collection.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-27 09:12 am (UTC)The problem I had with the ending, and probably this is just me being unreasonable, is that both Kate and John talk about the Terminator leading them to the fallout shelter (which, btw, I hope is well-stocked with freeze-dried concentrates and that the water supply hasn't gone squirrelly in the past 30 years), but in fact it's Kate's DYING FATHER who tells them where to go. And while I fully believe that he would decoy them like that to save his daughter's life, I have a hard time believing that a dying man could be that Machiavellian that successfully. (And I have a slight problem with the fact that, yes, the world is now ending, but everyone John and Kate care about--everyone we've even SEEN over the course of the movie--is already dead. This makes the tragedy of nuclear holocaust seem more than a little abstract, and if nuclear holocaust should be anything, "abstract" is not it.)
I do like, though, the way that John Connor's James-Bond-movie assumptions about there being a central core to SKYNET get cut right out from under him. I would have liked the movie better, I think, if that kind of irony had been present throughout, but if they'd done that, it would have been a very difficult and very different movie.
Doggett
Date: 2003-07-28 07:32 am (UTC)And Doggett's such a nice, reliable guy who always tries to do the right thing. I would so do him.
Patrick has a small part in the new Charlie's Angels flick, and wears a white shirt for some of this scenes. Yummy.