Terminator 3, Rise Of the Machines

Saw Terminator 3, Rise Of the Machines. It was an action movie, full of kick-butt and bad-ass scenes. I remember there was a sort of brouhaha when it came out about whether it was sexist or not. I don't really think it is, but it isn't very progressive either. There's a female terminatrix this time (-trix is the suffix the film uses. I think it's meant to evoke technical writing and also BDSM.) She definitely uses her fake robo-gender as a weapon, seemingly a damsel in distress initially and later ballooning her breasts to befuddle a cop. She kicks ass and all but I feel some amount of progress is undone when the protagonists begin shouting gendered slurs at her (and when she seductively licks the blood of her victims to identify their DNA.) Whateva. It's not too bad, just not quite as edgy as it thinks it is.

As for the rest of the film, it's good fun for the most part. There's some fun action scenes. I think Arnold was getting a bit old by then however, and the female terminator has a kind of fashion-runway body, so CGI and wires are used liberally in the fight scenes. It's a bit disappointing, but then the terminator franchise has never been one to use kung-fu ballet. The liberal usage of CGI makes things look weirdly rubbery a few times, so it's not good CGI either. Be warned. The plot is setting up a reboot on the franchise, so there's a lot of exposition and setup and not much in the way of closure. I don't mind this, but some do.

There's some shadows of 9/11 I detected: skynet is given control of the nuclear computers in response to a small, opportunistic virus spreading through the US network. It turns out, of course, that giving up control for the sake of safety is not a good idea, but what conclusion did you expect? Also, at the end, John Conner tells us that we must survive and persist in the face of tragedy, which is a nice sentiment.

As usual, I'm made vaguely uncomfortable by the uber-machoness of the action film genre. To illustrate this point: in one scene, Arnold harvests clothing from a flamboyantly gay male stripper. He flips on the stripper's rhinestone-studded glasses and then, thinking better of it, throws them to the ground and grinds them underfoot. Once again, masculinity is established by what it is not. I suppose this is like the above point about sexism. It's not bad, but it's not very good either.