Gunzilla supposed Terminator 3 review

This morning I saw a test version of the new Terminator movie, called Rise of the Machines. Now, from the trailers it looks like a major shitfest but it's actually pretty darn good.

Nick Stahl is John Connor, a troubled kid on the verge of mental breakdown. His mother, dreams of cities crumbling to pieces and the events from the second movie which catapulted him into a life of constant fear and uncertainty have turned him into a paranoid mess. He knows at one point he will lead the downtrodden people of America into a revolt against the machines after a nuclear war destroys most of the planet's surface but he has no idea when the nukes are going to fall. When we meet him he's a drifter, going from town to town to escape from the teachings of his mother and the burden she put on him only to find guilt at the end of each tunnel . At one point he's stomping around an old shed, crying for his mother to stop tormenting him.

The start of the movie with John just roaming around might seem tedious and boring but it's interspersed with scenes of scientists at CyberDyne Systems and a computer system slowly going haywire. A typical rich upper-class prissy assistant named Kate, played by Claire Danes, is working for a guy named Freder who finds out that the system is taking control over essential functions at CyberDyne. Before he can notify anyone he dies horribly and Kate is trying to find out desperately what happened to him and what's happening with the system.

We then move into the future, where the rebels are fighting the machines. After a small victory, the rebels take control of several Terminator units. At the same time we visit a factory that churns out thousands of robots. Some look like the Schwarzenegger robot but others have a much smaller built and less aggressive look like the cyborg from the second Terminator movie. This part of the flick definitely manages to impress with wondrous art direction, design & sets, and its spectacular visual effects that make this sci-fi movie look like a pure work of genius. The plant where the machines are produced has different sections where different kinds of cyborg are fabricated. We see blueprints, schematics and machines making machines. On one floor, robots of the female kind are created, assembled and brought to life. They all look beautiful but they're the most lethal weapons on the planet. Just like real women, actually. Just after one of them is sent to a certain place in time by the machines, another cyborg, Arnold, is sent immediately after her.

Back to John, he's having a terrible dream about Los Angeles getting blown off the map. As he wakes, Arnold is there to offer him protection. Now, the female Terminator is not after John Connor. Rather, she's there to make sure the CyberDyne system has carte blanche to take over. Of course, that's where the she-bitch runs into Kate who is not so easily swayed by female charm. Pity, actually. Anyway, Arnold gives John an update on the events, he tells him that he needs to hack into the Matrix...errrrr, CyberDyne mainframe to stop the takeover. They both head to CyberDyne where they are attacked by the Terminatrix. This is also where they hook up with Kate.

By this time the military is also starting to experience minor glitches in their software. There is no panic yet but the people in charge are definitely on their guard. Now, hacking into the mainframe proved a bit useless, it turns out that access to the mainframe is impossible without a special access card that only a few people at CyberDyne have. One of them was Kate's boss Freder who, literally, took it to his grave. Yeah I know, it's a silly thing. They decide to dig the old corps up and again are attacked by the Terminatrix. Then there's a huge twist which I really shouldn't tell but it has to do with Arnold being a bit of an ambiguous bot. That's about as far as I'll go with this. It's a really cool thing to blend the cyborgs that Arnold played in the first two flicks. He's separated from John and Kate who are now left to their own devices.

How does it end? Now, that's something I'm not going to spoil. Let's just say there's a door to Terminator 4 so big you can drive a truck through it. I will tell some things about the quality of this flick, though.

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