Flak Magazine: Terminator 3, 07-18-03

It's easy to think of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines as forgettable summer entertainment. Director Jonathan Mostow (Breakdown, U-571) doesn't hammer home any philosophical or psychological points. It doesn't aspire to be another deep-thought, subtexty adventure in armchair philosophy a la Matrix Reloaded. It's got loud, noisy chase scenes; explosions; a new Terminator that's stepped out of the pages of Maxim and a star who's always teetered dangerously close to self-parody. Rather than the constant prodding of earlier blockbusters this summer, this film scarcely acknowledges there are any ideas underlying it.

The first Terminator was made in 1984, the same year as Reagan's re-election and Apple's famous "1984" Super Bowl commercial. The fears of that era — technology getting out of hand, nuclear armageddon, Communist victory of the Cold War — were the movie's vicious undercurrent. As in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, these murderous cyborgs were built by a corporation. They blend seamlessly into everyday society and they kill to get what they want. Witness the scene in the dance club, where Arnold fires an Uzi while "TECH-NOIR" flashes in the background and new-wave music plays on the soundtrack. With computers so new to the public that their capabilities were unknown and seemingly limitless, the leap from a monochrome screen running WordStar to an unstoppable killing machine that thinks was an easy one to make. The Terminator also followed WarGames, another movie where a self-aware computer takes over and brings the world to the cusp of nuclear war. Without any real-world experience to the contrary, suddenly the progress of science was a threat.

Far more notable, however, was the film's apprehension about totalitarianism. The machines embrace the worst of human behavior. Their army and weaponry are superior; they seek nothing less than the elimination of mankind. The final solution to the human question is the exact same as Nazi Germany's: concentration camps that force some humans to be the workers, loading everyone else into killing machines. They're even given barcode tattoos on their arms, to make sure you didn't miss the point.

When the sequel hit the multiplexes seven years later, the Berlin Wall had fallen and the Soviet Union was teetering towards its collapse; meanwhile, computers had entered our homes, offices and schools, quickly becoming indispensable and easier to use. Besides, a computer that crashed every few days certainly couldn't take over the world. A terminator was as likely to suddenly freeze up as to kill you. In such a world, how could America be so afraid of computers and nuclear war? The cold war was over, computers were good, and so, of course, when Terminator 2: Judgment Day was released, Schwarzenegger was now a good guy. Not only that, the movie essentially promised a better future. Sarah Connor and her son, John, the targets of all this attempted termination, didn't just destroy the new terminator; they destroyed Skynet, preventing a robot-dominated future from ever taking place.

The early '90s were a particularly optimistic time in light of everything going on in geopolitics. George H.W. Bush's New World Order of cooperation among different countries led to a quick squashing of Iraq. Half a year after the release of T2, the Soviet Union officially disbanded. Apartheid was finally ending in South Africa, multiculturalism ruled in America and the Western world was tightly tied together. Hell, two years later, it even looked like the whole Middle Eastern Crisis was going to get resolved. Maybe the economy wasn't so hot, but what did that matter? Like a mother explaining that all the family needed was each other, we were excited just to be alive, with a glorious future awaiting us.

Damn, were we ever ignorant.

The '00s started out with one disappointment after another. First, the election brouhaha. Then the bottom fell out of the stock market. And then, y'know, Sept. 11.

Films — especially blockbusters — have always done a great job of reflecting current American sentiment. And considering all we've been through over the past three years, it's not surprising to see a new set of apocalyptic movies being forced upon us. Sure, science running rampant has never really gone away — look at Jurassic Park, or maybe Enemy of the State — but in the biggest blockbusters of the '90s, death wasn't caused by man himself. In Independence Day, it was aliens. In the new Star Wars movies, it's the Dark Side. In Armageddon and Deep Impact, it was asteroids.

But we're starting to see smaller films like 28 Days Later, a zombie movie remade as an epidemic film, in which scientists create a "rage virus" that escapes to devastate Britain; and blockbusters like X2, which has a nice subtext about the war on terror. And now T3, which manages to encompass so many of our new fears in just 109 short minutes. No, I'm not talking about women that can transform appendages into plasma cannons.

I'm talking about terrorism. Right after the T-X (Kristanna Loken) pops up in modern-day Los Angeles, she drives around in search of John Connor's future lieutenants and terminates them. But the kids themselves — one of whom is working the night shift at a Taco Bell, and another two who are throwing a party while their parents are away — have no clue about their futures. While many people were killed in the first two movies, it was mostly because they had the bad luck to be in the way. The exceptions are, of course, the Terminator's targets (or the people it mistakes for them, like the other Sarah Conners in the phone book), but even then, the killings tend to be quiet, almost intimate affairs. Here, the kids are targeted for who they are: leaders of a future rebellion, attacked in public spaces and surrounding by screaming friends. It's strikingly similar in method to the DC snipers, and in motive to any jihad-bent terrorist trying to undermine the culture that might overcome it.

Meanwhile, technophobia is starting to make a comeback, as computers get smaller and more interconnected. The Internet was practically unheard of back in '91, and there's no reference to it in T2. But in T3, John Connor is concerned enough to live "off the grid," away from the prying eyes of the government and credit agencies. The T-X downloads its target information from the Internet and over a cell phone; for the techie-bugaboo trifecta, a virus is slowly taking over the Internet. Then TV stations stop broadcasting, and cell phone networks fail. The action all takes place on this slowly decaying stage, stranding the protagonists between electronics that no longer work and electronics trying to kill them. And then there's Skynet itself: self-aware, anti-Western, residing in a cave somewhere in the desert … only this time, it's their side that has the Mother of All Bombs.

In fact, T3 is very aware of the renewed threat of weapons of mass destruction. Even if our parents' nuclear armageddon — old style, with the Soviet Union and America lobbing nukes at one another — has gone out of style, it's hard to argue the premise isn't frightening again. Nukes may not be scary in the sense of the end of the world, but we're still worried about a lone one going off in Washington or New York (or LA). Misguided or not, we've just fought a war in Iraq dedicated to wiping out WMDs, and there are so many new nuclear powers in the last five years — India, Pakistan, North Korea and soon, perhaps, Iran — that Judgment Day is starting to dwell on our minds again. We may still be the only superpower, but we've learned in the past few years that such status doesn't make us invincible. In a world where knowledge is so available, where individuals instead of nations can create weapons of mass destruction — chemical, biological, radiological or even informational — our future is once again as cloudy as it was in the mid-1980s.

To say more risks spoiling the ending. Suffice it to say that unlike the other blockbusters of the summer, word of mouth has generally been good, and deservedly so. Despite its B-movie outlook on life, despite its explosions and cheesecake villainess, Terminator 3 has more to say about the American psyche today than either The Matrix Reloaded or Hulk do, and it's a more engaging, entertaining movie by far. Maybe you can't call it art, but at least it doesn't try too hard.

— Nick Gorski (thatguy@truefiction.org)