Spoilers for Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines follow. If you read ahead without seeing the film first, surprises will be terminated.

"The life you know; all the stuff you take for granted - it's not gonna last. Imagine a world of permanent darkness, where machines control man's destiny. Imagine you were the only one who could stop it. But before you do...something terrible has to happen." - John Connor, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

There's no fate but what we make. History isn't written. Sound familiar? 1984's The Terminator and 1991's Terminator 2: Judgment Day tell the story of Sarah Connor and her crusade to prevent nuclear war from wiping out the human race. The enemy? SkyNet and a race of machines that have judged humanity to be the enemy. The leader of the human army? Sarah's son, John Connor. Although the previous film in the series wrapped things up rather nicely, director Johnathan Mostow and actor/would-be-governor Arnold Schwarzeneggar bring us another chapter in the sci-fi action saga, 2003's Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.

It is the present day. Judgement Day did not occur as it was supposed to in August 1997 thanks to the efforts of John Connor and friends in Terminator 2. John never believed that it was truly over, however, and after the death of his mother in 1997 he began living "off the grid": no phone, no address, no home. He's become a drifter, working his way from place to place trying to flee from a destiny that he may or may not have to fulfill someday. After a nasty motorcycle accident he breaks into an animal hospital for pain killers and bandages.


In Beverly Hills a time displacement field appears and brings a naked woman into our world. She is the T-X (aka the Terminatrix), the latest model of Terminator robot. She is the first Terminator with a default female appearance, giving her the grace of a woman along with the power to distract men with her beauty, as well as possessing an internal endoskeleton and the memetic polyalloy of the T-1000. In short she's a battle-enhanced robot skeleton surrounded by a layer of liquid metal. The liquid metal aspect of her form allows her to take the form of anyone she touches, while her skeletal structure allows her to break loose with sophisticated laser weapons that the T-1000 could not form on its own. And, just like the T-1000 has the default appearance of Robert Patrick, the T-X comes factory-shipped as model Kristanna Loken. The T-X can also speak modem and she makes a cell phone call to a computer to access data for her mission: the termination of future-John Connor's key lieutenants.

Our story also includes veternarian Kate Brewster, former friend of John Connor and an important player in the war of the future. Her father is a high muckity-muck in the military and he's been working on an important project: a little something called SkyNet, intelligent artificial intelligence software that could someday automate all of the USA's weapons and defenses. The system is still being tested, however, and is not ready for use. This changes when a computer virus begins shutting down systems and networks around the world. It's theorized if SkyNet is brought online and given control of everything, it can stop the virus.

Finally there's the T-800 Arnold Schwarzeneggar model of Terminator. Once again the humans of the future have captured one of these killing machines and have reprogrammed it to assist John Connor in the past. This particular T-800 has a past, however. It is the same robot that killed John Connor in the future. His wife, Kate, sent it back in time to aid humanity in the past after it murdered John Connor in the future. So our hero's killer is now his protector, see? After a harrowing crane chase through the city our three heroes hit the road and drive out to the gravesite of the late Sarah Connor, and off we go...

Terminator 3 behaves much like you expect it would, with chase scenes, Terminator-on-Terminator fight scenes, and dialogue about paradoxes that would give Doc Brown a headache. There are thrilling plot twists and surprises as we learn that SkyNet is actually the computer virus and by turning over all control of the government's weapons to it, mankind has put in motion the final steps towards Judgement Day. As we are told in the film, the events of Terminator 2 merely delayed SkyNet and Judgment Day by several years (like any major software release, SkyNet doesn't ship on time). SkyNet's rise and the nuclear war were inevitable. We also learn that Kate and John's meeting was inevitable, as was their survival and John's rise to leader of the resistance against the machines. Doesn't this invalidate the whole "no fate but what we make" idea? If everything is predetermined and preordained, then how can there be no future but what we make for ourselves? I cannot decide if this is a complete 180 degree turn from the ideals of the previous film or yet another paradox in the Terminator saga.

The film closes with the arrival of Judgment Day and three billion human lives extinguished by nuclear weapons. Obviously we are being set up for Terminator 4 here, as all that's left to show to bring the series full circle is the war against the machines and an older John Connor sending Kyle Reese back in time to 1984. Will we see the T-800 yet again? Chances are that he'll be back.


Terminator 3 has a few good points, and a legion of bad ones. While its action is decent, it’s quite blatantly just another by-the-numbers episode of a continuing franchise, and its last five minutes are an unbelievably hollow setup for a sequel. It also suffers horribly by comparison with the James Cameron works that preceded it: the first, trend-setting, career-building and utterly cool "The Terminator" and the sequel by which all action sequels are judged, the legendary T2.

I shouldn’t really have to discuss T1 and T2 in a review of the present film, but I will because T3 cannot (and doesn’t even try to) stand on its own. In case modern audiences have forgotten, The Terminator was the movie that made Arnold Schwarzenegger, James Cameron, and Linda Hamilton household names. Cameron and Hamilton were complete nobodies before T1, and Arnie’s most impressive showing to date was Conan the Barbarian - need I say more? It didn’t hurt Stan Winston and Michael Biehn, either. T1 wasn’t the most original SF-action movie ever made, but it was atmospheric, true to its own logic and way cool in spite of the wretched Eighties hairstyles. (See gleeme’s stunning review here).

A few years down the road, Terminator 2: Judgment Day was one of the few sequels ever made that actually set the bar higher than their predecessors. It was an epic work with a budget several times larger than T1. It had special effects and stuntwork that were absolutely unbelievable at the time, and are still pretty amazing twelve years later. It twisted the original story around in surprising ways, but also acknowledged that story and built upon its foundation. Its characters were living hellish lives that were plausible extrapolations of the first movie’s plot. It had a strong human side and a philosophical element, great acting for the genre, and combat and chase scenes that were an order of magnitude more extreme than the action in the first movie. T2 broke new ground in every department, and is still one of the most rewatchable action movies around.

T3, on the other hand, only scores well in the action department, and even there only its first big chase scene gets full marks. This scene, an extended fight/chase segment that takes us through half of Los Angeles, is the one bit that makes me think Jonathan Mostow might be an action director to keep an eye on. Night fades into day in a series of beautiful shots, as the Terminatrix chases the heroes in a heavy crane while driving a squad of police cars and fire vehicles by remote control. The action is intense, and the property damage is extensive and realistic, with the kind of visceral impact that was wholly missing from the CG-driven Big Chase Scene in the Matrix Reloaded. This chase is as good as anything seen in the first two movies, and we start the movie with a strong feeling that the Terminator franchise might not need James Cameron after all.

But as soon as that chase is over, the movie starts showing signs of advanced sequelitis. We see a long series of nods to T1 and T2, along with a bunch of moments where characters and motifs from the previous movies are used as jokes. We see some fair acting, and some not so great - Nick Stahl is fairly believable, and Claire Danes is Claire Danes, but Arnold seems to have forgotten that the Terminator is a machine, and the Terminatrix isn’t nearly as menacing as Robert Patrick’s T-1000. We see some rather inept Terminator prototypes, which are about as scary as the robot in Short Circuit. What we don’t see is the passion that Cameron built into his Terminator movies. We don’t see any sign that the filmmakers cared about this movie at all.

The new Terminator (does anybody believe that a guy like John Connor, who spent more time out of schools than in them and probably never had a chance to read a book in his life, would just spontaneously decide to call it a “Terminatrix”?) does have a couple of new tricks up her snakeskin sleeves, but by the end of the first chase she has no more surprises for us. I, for one, was looking forward to seeing her take over entire fleets of machines to use against the heroes, but it seems like the scriptwriters completely forgot about that power almost as soon as they introduced it. (Maybe because they couldn’t think of a way for the heroes to overcome it?) Instead they chose to emphasize her built-in weaponry. Obviously the fact that she comes standard with plasma weapons is meant to ratchet up the tension, but it actually has the opposite effect. This is the sort of “bigger and louder” thinking that marks almost every run of the mill action sequel, like the xenomorphs that get more numerous and clearly visible in every installment of the Alien saga - and, like them, it works against the movie. We’ve seen big explosions before, guys. In fact, we see them in almost every movie Arnold makes.

Most of the gags are pretty lame, too, and frequently stretch the limits of believability and consistency. When Arnold steals a car, he looks for keys in the driver’s visor instead of hotwiring it - despite the fact that he is supposed to be a different T-800, without any memories of events from T2. In fact, Connor pointedly gripes about how he is going to have teach Arnold all over again. When Kate (Danes) needs counselling, the psychologist on call happens to be the doc from the first two movies, who immediately begins to babble about how hostage situations can make you imagine insane things. And so on and so forth, until we come to the final scene. And this scene, unfortunately, is the ultimate insult to the audience. It’s almost as degrading as the end of Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes. And, like POTA, it uses a hokey sci-fi cliche as a “Shocking Surprise Twist Ending” and falls flat on its face.

Despite all of my criticisms, I could have enjoyed T3 if it had ended five minutes earlier. If it had been a complete movie like T2 was, it still wouldn’t have been Great Art, but it would have been a decent summer blockbuster, worth seeing at least for the crane chase. But T3 isn’t complete. Like so many other films from the last few years, it's written as an episode from an old-fashioned serial. The ending not only deprives the audience of any sort of closure, but completely invalidates everything the heroes did in the second half of the movie. You may think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not - none of the heroes’ actions has any importance whatsoever after what they discover in the final scene, which at least one of them should have known well in advance. He’s, like, from the future, you know? Where this already happened?

In short, stupid. After almost two hours of intermittently enjoyable popcorn movie, the last five minutes just made me want to ask for my money back. Scroll down if you don't mind major spoilers, because I simply feel compelled to gripe about the catastrophic silliness levels of the final scene...




NOTE: several insulted fans have told me that the original version of the following was way too harsh on the movie. Also, several of our military types and tech-heads have pointed out that a few of my criticisms were inaccurate. Now, I'm far too stubborn to change my mind about the scene as a whole, but I'm always willing to admit when I've got my facts wrong. I have revised a couple of points to suit these rebuttals, and I've added notes to others. I still think the last fifteen or so minutes of T3 are based on dumb, lazy writing and the assumption that the viewers are all idiots, so don't get all excited.

What went wrong in the final scene, or “How to Kill the Suspension of Disbelief”:

  • Obviously, Arnold knew that the mountain base was a fallout shelter/command center. He knew from the beginning that they weren’t going to stop Judgment Day. So did Claire’s character in the future. Wouldn’t she have programmed him to absolutely, without fail, just bring them to the shelter (or, lacking the access codes, some other safe place) instead of fucking around in the Skynet base? Wouldn’t she have told him “listen, Arnie, I’m going to want to go save my father. It won’t work and it might get us killed, so don’t let me do it”?
  • There’s nobody guarding this ultra-secret command base, even though it is stocked with huge-ass computer mainframes and has active CnC access to the entire US military? Okay, maybe the Army thought that blast door was enough to protect the secret base. But there are working vehicles parked outside the blast doors, ready to drive, without any guards. Sorry guys, the Army doesn’t leave its hardware parked in the middle of nowhere without guards. Ever. Responding to Uberbanana on this point: First of all, this wasn't a junkyard, it was an antiquated but apparently functional command center built to survive direct nuclear attacks. The fact that Claire's father remembers this facility off the top of his head implies that the base is still part of some kind of contingency plan, although probably as a last last last resort. It would, therefore, be guarded, as would the hardware, no matter how old it was. Your claim that the trucks out front are forty years old and don't have any gas means absolutely nothing. In my own military experience, I've used vehicles and fired weapons that were more than forty years old and still got used on a daily basis. I've also been posted to guard bases that held much less valuable contents than that one, simply because in a certain kind of hypothetical conflict, they might become strategically important.
  • The T-X crashes into the base in a huge fucking helicopter, sliding almost to point blank range of Our Heroes, but she can’t kill them before they read and enter the password to open the door? Uberbanana - yes, it is necessary to state this, because it is totally preposterous and has no plot justification whatsoever. If Steven Spielberg had come to the end of Jaws and decided that the heroes could beat the shark because it suddenly turned out that the shark was really, really slow and its teeth were made of rubber, wouldn't you protest?
  • When Arnold crash-lands to fight off the Terminatrix, she is totally surprised, as if he had just popped out of a trapdoor. How in the name of the deus ex machina did he manage to sneak up on her? She's the most advanced military robot ever built. She's at least two generations ahead of Arnie. Did she not look around even once during her flight? Was she driven to disorientation by a futile series of stalemated Tic-Tac-Toe games with the navigational computer? Okay, as several of you pointed out, this is reasonable. The Jetranger the T-X is flying has no radar, and the T-X could reasonably have assumed that Arnie was gone for good thanks to her nano whammy, and thus been surprised. I'll concede that this within the realm of possibility. Still an annoyingly off-key note, in my opinion.
  • Arnold has already removed one of his dual power sources after his first fight with the T-X. In the final fight, he pulls out the other one and stuffs it into the T-X’s mouth. And what, exactly, is keeping him running while he holds her down and utters his last retreaded tagline? NOTE - Walter says there is another auxiliary power source, as seen in T2. I got the impression that the second battery was the auxiliary, but Walter is probably right.
  • The blast door didn’t close when the explosion occurs, because Arnie is blocking it. Half of the mountainside is instantly vaporized. But the heroes, standing maybe twenty feet away, are completely safe. Yeah, I can believe that. Sure. Tune in next week, when the Earth’s core explodes and John and Kate are protected from the blast by hiding in a portable toilet.




Don’t read this write up unless you have seen all three Terminator movies

Living out side of mass media for the last eight months I had only seen one T3 commercial and the teaser a few times the year before. I went to see the movie of my own free will (not a common occurrence these days). I thought that T3 was a well put together script, and a worthy addition to the series. Noted I said addition in that this movie cannot stand alone on its non existent feet. It is in fact a sequel that must been seen in order to truly understand.

Now to the meat. Before the opening credits, I knew that this would be another attempt at the destruction of SkyNet. The fact that I was watching the movie proved that the attempt was a failure, and I was watching to see how continuity could be restored, if at all possible. Most movies that deal with time travel are impossible. The writer makes a story about (A) Going back in time to stop something from happening that you know did not happen. Impossible: see Time Cop (B) Traveling to the future to stop something from happening. Unnecessary: you can change the future by knowing what the outcome is in the present. (C) Changing the outcome of a future event in the present. Silly: this is not a story about time travel, it is everyday life. The exception to this rule is when someone or something comes back from the future, to help you change what is in the future. This negates said time travel.

The Terminator series is of the third type, and impossible until you watch the third installment. T1 stood alone and did not create any paradoxes but allowed history to continue along its route. Kyle Reese is sent into the past by John Conner to protect his mother. Unknown to Kyle was that his mission also called for him to impregnate Sarah Conner, insuring that the future happened. This is not a paradox but a time looping event. Kyle was not sent to stop judgment day. The series could have ended there, with a mediocre movie about the bleak future, but a squeal was made. In T2 we have Sarah Connor and John Connor now attempting stop the creation of SkyNet. If they succeeded there would be no judgment day, no war, no Terminators. What they did was destroy the remains of the first T-800 that was sent back to kill Sarah. Now why would anyone think this was closure? They destroyed the origin of SkyNet? No they didn’t. If SkyNet had been destroyed then there would never have been a T-800 sent back, T1 wouldn’t have happened, but time went on and the characters retained their memories of the events. James Cameron has just invalidated his movies. This is where T3 comes in. We don’t get closure but a logical explanation for the last few minutes of the second film (i.e. SkyNet was not destroyed).

In T3 There is another attempt to stop SkyNet. As I stated before that watching the movie proves that it was a failure. The fact that John Conner is alive is proof that it was a failure. I just wanted to find out how they can explain this. Of course this was expecting a lot from an action movie, but I found they fixed the problem nicely. After much running around, bullet shooting, explosions, and expensive stunt work the movie decides to develop some plot, or explain it to those who haven’t figured it out. During one rest stop it is revealed that Kate’s father is a high ranking officer in the Air Force in charge of the SkyNet program. Something I learned twenty minutes into the movie when Kate is on the phone with her father, who is standing around a lot of programmers and chrome plating, in what appears to be an underground base (they are always in underground bases). Kate wants to save her father, John wants to blow up SkyNet, and Arnold wants to take a mobile home to Mexico. After some more dialogue Kate’s father is shot, they convince him to let them blow up the SkyNet core.

They thought SkyNet was infected with a virus which made it want to destroy all humans, when in fact it was the internet that had become self aware. SkyNet was just waiting for its T4 line to get hooked up, so that it could download some juice pics of Bill Gate’s home computer with it’s casing off. The internet tells SkyNet that it is through with doing the human’s bitch work (in other words the EDB is really hungry), SkyNet say “Hey I have a lot of guns let’s kill them all.” and proceeds to shoot everyone in the base.

Kate’s bleeding father takes them to his office, tells them that the SkyNet core is in a mountain bunker and gives them the access codes to get in. Some more action happens including a brisk jog through a particle accelerator. The two human now romantically entangled fly to the bunker where things are collecting dust. If this is where the government supercomputer is stored, why is everything so old, and there are no defenses save a giant blast door? Something is up.

The T-X crashes through the hanger door behind them in a helicopter, and stalks toward the two as they are just able to unlock the blast door. The T-800 crashes through the hanger door in a larger helicopter and lands on the T-X. The two Terminators wrestle a bit, the humans run down the tunnel, the Terminators blow up, and the tunnel is sealed. When they Humans reach the end of the tunnel they don’t find a supercomputer core but a forty year old fall-out shelter. Kate’s father wasn’t telling them where the SkyNet core was but the closest safe place to go.

Ah-ha, that works. SkyNet is preserved, judgment day happens, John and Kate are safe, and start the resistance. We get a nice setup for a possible fourth movie.

Of course this isn’t an entire plot summary but I’m trying to negotiate how the story redeems it self and makes justifiable events. The whole “There is no fate but what we make.” is just an idealism that the people in the present (and Kyle Reese because he doesn’t know any better) tell themselves so that they think they can change the future. But if they had changed the future their present wouldn’t have occurred.

Here are a few things wrong with the movie:

  • T-X has the ability to replicate clothing with it’s memetic polyalloy skin during the rest of the movie but not when it first arrived in the past.
  • One of the bigger ones was that when the T-X was caught in the magnetic pull of the particle accelerator, it used a circular saw to destroy said accelerator, when it would have been completely impossible to get the blade to spin.
  • Here are a few things that DejaMorgana got wrong

  • The T-800 did not look for keys in the visor but found a watch so that it would know the exact time. The T-800 did in fact hotwire the car.
  • Yes, the T-800 knew from the beginning that they couldn’t stop judgment day. How could they have destroyed the internet in less than a day? But his mission was to protect Kate and John. The future Kate programmed him to do so, but she didn’t tell him how to do it. All he was told was that through Kate John gets in contact with the remnants of the military and starts the resistance.
  • Kate programmed the T-800 to obey her and not John, because she knew that they had gone to save her father, but not immediately to stop SkyNet.
  • She knew what had happened and expected that her past self would do the same thing.
  • Any extra information she could have given the T-800 could have changed the course of history.
  • By telling it not to let past Kate to do this thing or not to go there it has parameters that will affect the events.
  • By just having it protect, past Kate and John don’t get to much information, and they follow the same choices the future counterparts made.
  • The only way that she deviated was that the T-800 was allowed to tell John and Kate how John died in the future. Lets just hope that John lets himself get killed so that the T-800 can get reprogrammed and sent back.
  • There are junk yards all over the U.S. The trucks out front are nearly forty years old and collecting dust. You wouldn’t even be able to steal them unless you brought new gasoline and engine oil for them. The only security at the fall-out shelter was the blast door with an extremely cryptic security interface, which you must have the codes to unlock. That is adequate protection to some equipment that can’t even play mine sweeper, and tons of MREs.
  • The thing about the T-X not killing John and Kate before they can open the blast door is not necessary to state.
  • The Terminators always stalk up to their targets even when they are standing, walking, limping, or running away.
  • The helicopter that it flew in with was just a small, two person helicopter, probably without radar.
  • There must be something wrong with its hearing, because while driving in the Lexus, with a cop cruiser chasing it with lights and siren going, the T-X only noticed when it looked in the side mirror.
  • The second Helicopter that the T-800 was in could have gone without notice.
  • But yes, the explosion in the mountain was rather large and I don’t see Kate and John escaping it as easily as they did.
Terminator 3: The shameless leg-humping of the movie industry

Okay, so that might not have been its original title, but it might as well have been. What a completely shameless series of abuse of an otherwise excellent concept. Cameron would have turned in his grave if he saw this. Oh, he is still alive. If I was Cameron, I would probably be wringing my hands in pleasure: I would be asked - nay - begged - to come back aboard to save the scraps of whatever T3 left behind, to see if T4 (the erection of the New World Order, perhaps?) can make the movie moguls some more cash.

Harsh? Perhaps. But true, nevertheless. However, there are just so many things that doesn't work.

T1 and T2 - the latter in particular - were hailed as the greatest action films of all times. People have written theses on T2's philosophical impact (!) into mainstream culture, on T2 seen as a gothic work (!) and on the two movies as an analysis of the dynamics between man and machine (!). Granted, T3 puts the man and machine thing into focus, as it strives to explain some of the questions raised in T1 and 2, such as how SkyNet could get to power in the first place.

For me, T1&2 were good action movies. Arnie leaves the air pregnant with testosterone, and every now and then, a movie like that seems to be necessary to keep the human race on its right trail. Or something. To accredit it with any further philosophical impact seems ludicrous, but whatever floats your coffin.

I have a few grievances.

1) What did they do with the money?

It was bassooned to high, wide and sundry that T3 had the largest green-light budget of any Hollywood film - ever. Which automatically sends the spit glands of all movie buffs into overload, leading to puddles of drool everywhere where such people might convene. Such as in movie theatres. However - as has already been introduced by the title of this part of the article - What did they do with the money? Okay, so the CGI stuff is decent, but Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl - a movie with a significantly lower budget - uses it to a much smoother effect.

Sure, Arnie ran off with a fair share of the money (He'll need it for his California Governor campaign - may the deities have mercy on our souls), and it looks like they did destruct a few city blocks in the process of making the film (okay, and the sequence with the crane - especially the bit leading to its destruction - is pretty nifty), but by today's Matrix-CGI and Battle Royale gore-standards, T3 falls in the trap of offering absolutely nothing new to the world of movies. Entertaining? Sure, but it makes no sense if you haven't seen T2. And T2 makes little sense if you haven't seen T1. For a movie of this calibre, you would assume that they would have come up with at least something new, yes?

2) I didn't want to kill T-X!

Kristanna Loken is a very hot woman, no doubt about it. But - paraphrasing one of the aforementioned movie buffs - You don't want to run away from her, you'll want to fuck her. What good is the most high-tech terminator in the world if she cannot embody the sheer menace of the predatorial Terminators of T1&2? She tries her best with her cold stares, but she is too damn sexy and too unpsychopathlike to be able to be of any consideration when it comes to terminatorial skills. Add that to the fact that her primary weapon is out of commission after a good whack to the head, and - for the love of all that is holy - of all the high-tech metal alloys that must exist in the world, that they couldn't make her of one that is non-magnetic?

Hell, the recorded voice on the London Underground that informs you that the train will terminate at the next station is scarier.

3) Why, oh why did they have to sell their souls?

In the UK, the film got a rating of 12a. Which is kind of similar to PG-13, except that you can be 12 years old. Or younger, in company with an adult.

The most mind-bending scenes from the previous terminator films include the Terminator doing graphic surgical operations on himself. T3? Not a drop of blood. Okay, so he cuts himself in this one as well, but you can tell it is foam rubber, and lacks the impact because a) it doesn't seem realistic and b) it has been done before.

Here's a message to the movie industry: If you want to cast the huge Schwarzenegger in a huge action movie where he is toting huge guns and eliminates (but doesn't kill - oh no - cause killing is bad, as a different terminator learned in T2) a huge amount of people - by god, we want to see a huge amount of blood!

T3's major fault, however, is the complete and utter lack of the testosterone. That's right - the stuff I have to clean off my DVD shelf every month, because it is seeping out of the other two Terminator movies at a ridiculous rate (I am surprised they didn't come with rags for the purpose. Or zip-loc bags). Arnie is 50-something in the new movie. Good body, though, I must say - regardless of age. The problem is that he is too friendly. He has lost much of his robotic quality (on the other hand, he has somewhat learned to act, but I am not sure which one I prefer), making him seem more at home in the Girls' Night in the strip club than straddling a motorcycle or riding T-X (ah - if it only were that kind of riding).

With the ending of T3 smelling more like a sequel coming up than any of the other Terminator films, I guess we are re in for another 'treat'. Except this time I hope they put the money where it is needed - more stuntmen, huge pyrotech, copious amounts of T&A, lots of blood, bigger weapons, louder sound, darker atmosphere and a voiceover by the guy who does The Tube - rather than the purse of California's future governor.

Kinda cool that they finally grasped the potential of distributed computing, though.
