Another one of my top ten most anticipated movies of the summer comes in on the most prestigious movie weekend of the year, 4th of July Weekend. Over the past 6 to 8 years, this weekend has been the most profitable and most mainstream Hollywood weekend of the year. The films that get released on this big time weekend aren’t usually the most intellectually stimulating films of the year but they usually have a very broad appeal towards mainstream audiences and can usually attract almost every demographic in the book. The interesting thing about Terminator 3 is that while it certainly doesn’t satisfy the intelligentsia, it seems to be alienating to some of the mainstream audiences as well. Terminator 3 is the latest and most expensive of this year’s crop of sequels weighing with a $200 million budget and aspiring politician Arnold Schwarzenegger back in the role of the T-101, a machine built for one purpose: to kill humans. For those of you who have not seen either of the two Terminator films, I’ll enlighten you because that’s what I do here. The story goes that in 1997, a computer called Skynet that controlled all of the world’s nuclear weapons gained awareness and decided to destroy humankind and let machines take over the world. One problem arose in Skynet’s plan when a human named John Conner led the surviving humans to revolt and destroy the machines. To solve this problem, Skynet sent one of its best killing machines called a Terminator back in time to kill John Conner’s mother, Sarah (played in the first two films by Linda Hamilton. Well, that didn’t work so a few years later Skynet sends another, more advanced Terminator called a T-1000 (played perfectly by Robert Patrick) to kill John as a child but luckily adult John was able to send back his own Terminator to protect the young John. So 1997 came and went and there was no nuclear holocaust but the studios hadn’t made enough money on the franchise yet so it turns out that Judgment Day wasn’t prevented but only delayed until now. Now John Conner is in his early 20s and played by Nick Stahl. As annoying as Edward Furlong was as the young John Conner, there was something more desperate and real about his performance than the rather flat and straightforward one given by Stahl in this film. The screenplay spells out for us exactly what Conner is supposed to be feeling but it would be nice to actually see it on the actor’s face. Moving along, John Conner has been living on the streets as an outcast from society so as to maintain anonymity in case another Terminator should ever come looking for him. Early on he meets Kate Brewster (Claire Daines) a young veterinarian who it turns out knew John when they were kids. As it turns out, Kate is to become one of John’s lieutenants one day so she gets put on the hit list of the newest Terminator model to be sent back, the T-X (played by the gorgeous Kristanna Loken) which for some reason seems to be far inferior to the T-1000 that was sent in the last movie. I’m sure I’m not the first one to point this out but the T-X is basically just another robot with skin on it. Granted she has an arm that turns into a weapon but she’d be no match for a T-1000. He’s liquid metal for God’s sake! He can turn into anything he wants, you can’t crush him or blow him up and the only way to kill him is by somehow pushing him into a vat of molten steel. Anyway, this is just one of the many gaps in logic that happens in this movie so I won’t linger on it for long. Another good Terminator gets sent back to protect John and Kate and this time he informs them that the nuclear holocaust they’ve been talking about for years is going to happen in about 6 hours. So not only do they have a hot killer robot after them but they also have to save 85% of the world’s population from getting fried. I’ll admit, that’s some pretty good narrative tension but it’s also a little cheap considering that the whole “nuclear bombs are gonna go off all over the world” thing has already been done 3,875,924 times! Using such an immediate task to drive the movie rather than a more overarching, long term task like the first two films makes this movie feel much less grandiose and less important. In the movie’s defense, the action sequences are spectacular, some of the best you’ll see this year in fact. Director Jonathan Mostow, who replaces the bowed-out James Cameron, has mastered a technique that I recently claimed could not be done, using CG figures to replace actors in stunt sequences. In my review of Die Another Day, the disappointing joke of a Bond movie, I complained that using a CG character instead on an actor just doesn’t have the same effect as seeing a stunt man being the image was so obviously fake that it takes away the impressiveness of the stunt. I maintain that the CGI replacements for the actors in Die Another Day were unimpressive and unrealistic but Jonathan Mostow proves in this movie that it can be done if only it is handled properly. The best example of this is in a sequence where Schwarzenegger’s character is hanging from a ladder on a speeding fire truck being driven by the T-X. In an attempt to destroy or at least shake the Terminator, the T-X swings the ladder to the side of the truck and smashes it through buildings as Schwarzenegger appears to be hanging from the ladder by only his hands. Normally, it would be an impossible or at least very dangerous stunt for a stuntman to smash through brick walls, windows and a moving car while hanging from a ladder so Mostow essentially replaces Schwarzenegger with a computer generate image (that’s CGI for you laymen). The animation is done so well that to the untrained eye, the images look completely real. This is quite a contribution to the ever improving world of CG effects but it’s probably the only contribution this movie will make to anything other than the Warner Bros. bank account. The screenplay is one of the least original sequels since Men In Black II. It sticks to exactly the same story structure as the first two films but lacks all the good stuff that came in between. It opens with the Terminators arriving naked and stealing clothes from some unwitting jerk because apparently clothes don’t travel through time (albeit this time we get a naked female Terminator). Then there are the two or three inevitable scenes where the bad Terminator shows up at someone’s home or work and kills them on the spot with a cold face of indifference. And of course, the scene where we think the bad Terminator is dead but it turns out to still be alive and makes one last surge to try and kill the humans. The only scenes in this film that are truly original are the ending, which I will not reveal, and the scene where John visits his mother’s grave. Sarah apparently died a few years prior of a cancer she had been fighting just long enough to make sure that Judgment Day didn’t come when it was scheduled to (actually Linda Hamilton refused to do the movie without James Cameron so they killed her off). This is a rather poignant scene between the son and mother and also a nice segway into one of the film’s most traditional action sequences, the graveyard shootout. As I said before I can’t mention any details about the ending without ruining it for you but there is a major problem that needs to be addressed regarding it. The effectiveness of the final scene depends on the John and Kate receiving a piece of information earlier in the film from a specific character. The ending doesn’t work or make any sense at all if they had received the information from anyone other than this specific character. The problem is, they received the information from a different character. Yes, my friends, Terminator 3 contains one of the most glaring, gaping plot holes I’ve ever seen in a major studio film. I am baffled as to how a film with $200 million budget could have made it all the way to my theater in Alabama without anyone noticing this huge mistake. This giant plot hole along with a generally unexciting bad guy (or girl in this case) and a couple of poor stylistic choices, namely the repeated use of blurry slow-motion that look like they came out of a bad ‘80s action movie make Terminator 3 an ultimately disappointing summer release. As I said before, the action is very well-done and the ending will actually kind of blow you away for the split second before you realize that it relies on a gaping plot hole. I suppose this film could work as a fitting end to the Terminator saga but I suspect that it won’t in fact be the last installment since the film is left just as open-ended as its two predecessors. I can’t recommend Terminator 3 to the general audiences because it’s just plain not a good movie but if you’re a hard core fan of the first two films, it’s probably worth seeing. Here’s to hoping against the odds that Warner Bros. leaves this once great series alone and quits while they’re still not that far behind.