All spring I sat in theaters and saw trailers for Terminator 3 and just kept saying how much of a train wreck it was going to be. Well, I saw it tonight and suprise - it wasn't really a train wreck! Although it wasn't a great movie either, but we'll get to that.

This movie is as sparse with dialog as any I can remember. A solid half the lines had to be one liners. And the whole thing is really just a non-stop action/chase scene. But they are well done, if not smart.

At a certain point I wonder when these two super advanced, intelligent killing machines will realize that they're effectively indistructable without seriously heavy ordinance. Sometimes I wonder why they bother with the hand to hand fights and small arms fire. But there I go, thinking too much.

Nick Stahl and Clair Danes did a good job actually having emotion since neither of the machines had any. But my favorite is the TX (the bad girl) suffered from Star Trek syndrome. Often in Star Trek there will be some huge crisis and the ship will explode unless some character can get to some place and stop it in like, say, 30 seconds. So they cut to that person on the way to main engineering or something and while the central computer is announcing 28...27...26...25 seconds to total destuction. And what are they doing? Walking! I don't know, if it was me I'd be booking down the corridor at a full sprint. But I guess that would be indignified for an officer. Anyway, that's what I call Star Trek syndrome and The TX did this - all the time. By moving slow she gave the characters time to do stuff they needed to do, like survive. I guess as a machine she had a heightened sense of the dramatic or something. Damn! Thinking too much again.

So that's it, the whole thing is a big, well made, brainless ride. I mean, how can you go wrong with having a firetruck try to sideswipe a deployed crane while booking down a city street. Plus, no movie has more collateral damage then this one.

There is one exception to the no brain thing. The end of the movie is, yes, get this, smart. I know, I couldn't believe it. Not only is it smart but it makes T2 ok as well. In a week or so when I'm not worried about spoilers maybe I'll go off about the problems in T2 and how T3 makes them all better, but for now I'll spare you.

There you go - it's not the train wreck I thought it would be. How's that for a ringing endorsement?

Note: Wendy and Tanya deserve special credit for coming along with me and Guy to this one. Especially since Guy and I got super geeky talking about comic book movies.

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