In the minds of many, Rise of the Machines was defined by what it lacked: not only Cameron, but every other Terminator star besides Schwarzenegger. Soon, he’d garner headlines not for movies, but his unlikely and successful gubernatorial campaign, which began shortly after Terminator 3’s release. For two years at the turn of the century, there were no blockbuster movies lead by one of the biggest stars of the previous decade. By the time the film arrived, over a decade later, it no longer had writer/director James Cameron involved, and star Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career was in a strange lull following the delayed release of his terrorist-hunting flop Collateral Damage. The past: The road to a third Terminator film was long and troubled - a combination of rights disputes, scheduling, and budget conflicts made what seemed like a no-brainer drag on throughout the ‘90s. The future leader of the human resistance isn’t meant to stop Judgment Day, but survive it. The movie’s ending is mean and definitive: John and Kate, locked in a bunker, as nuclear missiles criss-cross the globe. And, despite their best efforts to shut down Skynet, the machine masquerading as a man is proven right. “Judgment Day is inevitable,” the eponymous Terminator played by Arnold Schwarzenegger tells Connor when he arrives, sent from the future to protect him and his future wife Kate Brewster (Claire Danes) from the T-X. John Connor’s survival doesn’t avert disaster - it just postpones it. With no knowledge of Connor’s whereabouts, Skynet has sent the T-X back in time to kill all of future Connor’s lieutenants on the eve of its activation. That is, until it does, in the form of a new Terminator, the T-X (Kristanna Loken). Instead, he’s a burnout wrestling with the trauma that comes with a lifetime of being prepared for a war that never comes.
Arguably the darkest film in the franchise, Rise of the Machines is about what happens after we avert our pending doom, and the answer is that things don’t get much better.Īt the start of Terminator 3, John Connor (Nick Stahl) is not relieved at having stopped the T-1000 that was sent to kill him in 1995, nor is he at peace with knowing the nuclear apocalypse predicted for 1997 has not happened.
Terminator 3 hammers this point harder than most. That’s the point of these movies: we are always working towards our doom. (Except, of course, the killer robots the government is secretly working on.)
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Similarly, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines is set 10 years after that movie, a present-day 2005 virtually indistinguishable from the 2003 the movie was released in. 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day is set in a version of 1995 that’s mostly meant to feel contemporary. What glimpses of it we get are usually bleak: human civilization is leveled, reduced to rubble by the rogue artificial intelligence Skynet, which seizes control of the world’s nuclear stockpile to use in a pre-emptive attack on its biggest threat: humanity.Ī funny quirk of this film and the one preceding it is that while they are mostly set in “the present,” they do not take place in the year the movies were released. The future: The Terminator movies are, with the exception of Terminator Salvation, more about fighting the future than living in it. The movie: Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, directed by Jonathan Mostow In Yesterday’s Future, we revisit a movie about the future and consider the things it tells us about today, tomorrow, and yesterday.
The Verge is a place where you can consider the future.
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