Rise of the Machines [and Apathy]
posted on july 8, 2003, tag: entertainment
Making a sequel for the purposes of making a sequel is never good. And that's exactly what Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines felt like. From the [weak] beginning until the [stronger] ending, T3 was more about lengthy effects-laden battle sequences and catch phrases than anything else, even though the fate of the world was at stake. In fact, that whole 'nuclear holocaust' thing is actually, as Ebert wrote, secondary:
The movie cares so exclusively about its handful of characters that what happens to them is of supreme importance, and the planet is merely a backdrop.
While that might work somewhere else, it fails in T3. The film does not earn its ending, although I can say that the movie did get better as it progressed. It's unfortunate that by the time the storyline and action sequences start to become less jarring and out of place, the movie's remaining time is down to 20 minutes.
Also, I don't know why the director and special effects people felt this was an acceptable film to release, since you can see the digital blurring-out of Arnold Schwarzenegger's crows-feet (and various other wrinkles) throughout the whole film. And speaking of the effects: what the hell is going on when, 10 years after Terminator 2: Judgement Day, in which the effects were unbelievably great for their time, you can't pull off liquid-metal effects? Craziness! I can't believe how poor some of the effects were in this movie. In fact, the only really great ones were when the T-101 (Arnold) was beaten up at the end and you could see through parts of his body. But, much like everything else, just when this gets good, it's over. Unfortunate.
After watching the movie last night, I kept thinking more about the time paradoxes that take place in the series, and came across a depressing realization that nothing in any of the three films matters. Sending a Terminator back to the past to kill someone doesn't work, since, if it were to succeed, it would negate its own existence. That means the Terminator could never exist unless it failed, meaning it would never succeed, meaning 6 hours of my life have been spent hoping John Conner survives regardless of the fact that he will because he can't not [succeed]. Either way, it's all a big loop—a loop that didn't need T3 to be involved.
Comments
There are 7 comments, comments are closed
Stephen DesRoches on 07/08/2003:
Not sure I understand th e comments in your last paragraph. (this being said before I watch T3) The Terminator was not sent back to destroy it's creator but to destroy John (the leader of the fight against the machines). That said, if John dies, the Terminator is still invented by skynet.
Garrett on 07/08/2003:
Yeah, my fault, I miswrote something. I mean to say that the Terminator has to fail because otherwise there would be no John Conner in the future... therefore there would be no reason to send a Terminator back... or something...
This is all a mind fuck.
John Barker on 07/08/2003:
It's been so long since I saw T1, I need to go rent it or something — I can't even remember what it's about!
Stephen DesRoches on 07/08/2003:
but thats just it. The Terminator was sent back to eliminate John and change the future. If John was never born, or killed then there would be no reason to continue the loop. Still not sure I understand your loop.
My question is why don't they keep sending the Terminator back to the same point in history before John was born?
Linus on 07/10/2003:
I have a problem similar to Stephen's: if a Terminator is sent back in time and fails his/her mission, it really doesn't mean anything. If its creators have time travel technology, they can keep trying again as many times as they want.
I also have a problem with how all films/TV shows, including the Terminator movies (as cool as they were, T3 too IMO), seem to handle time travel. They all conveniently ignore this whole paradox that I think Garrett was talking about. It was best explained in the more recent version of "The Time Machine," although I had problems with the paradoxes of that movie, too. Anyway, I'm going to relay it, so if you don't want it to be spoiled, stop reading.
Alexander originally builds the time machine because he wants to prevent the murder of his fiancée in the past. Near the end of the movie, the Uber-Morlock explains to him that this would have been impossible, because if he prevented her death, his past self would never have built the time machine in the first place, and he wouldn't have been able to travel back in time. So she would have died. But then he would have built it...
The conclusion to which speculation like this leads me is that it is indeed impossible to mess with the timeline. When you travel into the past, it isn't the past for you, and the you that travelled to the past is the future self of the you that belongs in the past. You might say that it's therefore possible to travel to the past and back if you don't affect your past self while you're there. But you have to have an affect on something. Your mere presence in the past means that the future will be different, and this leads again to a logical loop. If you don't affect your past self, you may still travel to the past in the future, but you will travel there in a different way due to the miniscule effect that you did have. It's impossible that, in the new timeline you created by travelling to the past, you will again travel to the past in the exact same way. If you do end up travelling to the past in the new timeline, you will do it in a different way than in the old timeline, and you will therefore have a different effect on it. Because of this effect, you will create another new timeline in which you travel to the past (or don't) in another new way. Another loop.
Anyway, sorry for ranting. I was kind of thinking about that as I wrote it, but hopefully it will somehow contribute to the discussion. :)
Jim on 07/17/2003:
You guys know wayyy too much about the Terminator movies.
Christopher Dunn on 08/11/2003:
There are a couple of common misunderstandings about time travel.
First, there is the notion that it all makes sense as long as it's self-consistent. For example, you can go back in time and tell yourself how to build a time machine, but you cannot kill yourself.
This is wrong. The emphais on consistency assumes deterministic history, but that is simply not how the world works. If you reset the initial conditions of, say, 1980, events will not repeat in exactly the same way. Completely random quantum fluctuations create small differences which can become large differences in chaotic systems. The weather, in particular, will be completely different: different hurricanes, different lightning strikes, different droughts, etc. Neural pathways in a person's brain might be slightly different because of changed external conditions, or small mutations caused by random cosmic rays, or even random chemical processes within the brain itself. That could lead to slightly different inventions, conversations, and human relations. The farther down the time line you travel from that initial point, the greater the difference.
Those differences are then amplified by the feed-back loop of time travel, and the result becomes completely inconsistent under any imagined circumstances.
But then there is the second misunderstanding, which is that time travel alters the past of the time-traveler himself. This is not necessarily the case. I cannot say for sure, since I have not tried it myself, but I think it conceivable that time-travel leads to the spawning of a parallel universe. So when your future self kills you, it is not your this-universe future self, but rather your other-universe future self. He did not die because in the universe from which he came, nobody came back to kill him.
You might suppose that this idea wrecks the plot of the movie, but does it really? Maybe you cannot fix your current situation by going back to your own past, but maybe you can spawn a parallel universe in which things are done better. And if the same thing is attempted there, and so on and so on, then some twin of yours could exist in another universe which actually is, as Voltaire's Candide liked to say, "the best of all possible universes".