Was there a movie that you didn’t really like, but still liked the ending?

Terminator 3 is a film that doesn’t serve much purpose. It’s a recycling, a poorly written ersatz of the first 2, with a bad choice of actors. Schwarzy makes a fool of himself. The antagonist doesn’t hold up compared to the old ones. It could have been a good idea to make her a woman if we had taken a good actress, if we had directed her well and written her well, wondering how to exploit her femininity as a weapon.

Instead we have an actress who does the bare minimum by imitating Robert Patrick’s acting as the T-1000 from Terminator 2. Except that only Robert Patrick can do Robert Patrick, you have to have his face and his acting skills.

And that’s not even the worst. John Connor is embarrassing. We were shown him as a rebellious pre-teen and then as a warrior adult in the 2nd. Between these two ages we are shown a young adult lacking self-confidence in the 3rd without really knowing why. This decline… If we focus on the evolution it really clashes.

And yet, while we relax after a while, the apocalyptic ending hits us hard with its fatalism. I would have almost preferred that everything was crap, to bury it. Instead, it turns it into a mess.

But I’m not going to be too harsh either. It was becoming much too complicated to follow the first two. Firstly because they were really too good. Then because the 2nd one introduced a temporal paradox from which the series could not heal. This will be verified with the sequels, even more useless and absurd.

For me, you just shouldn’t see Terminator as a series. The first one is enough in itself, there was no plan to make a sequel. The second one is a kind of very successful big budget remake oriented action and to be seen as an extension, a bonus. Everything else is just a more or less lame derivative product.