Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (R)
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This came out in 2003. I must have first seen it on DVD within a couple years of its release, but I didn't write a review at the time, and I didn't keep the DVD. I'm sure I didn't hate it, but I'm also sure I didn't really care for it. And in the years since then, I kind of came to think of it as non-canonical, anyway. But I got it on DVD again in 2022, to re-watch and write a review. And I probably liked it slightly more than I did the first time I saw it.

I guess this is set in 2004, when John Connor (Nick Stahl) is a young man. His mother had died several years prior to the film, and since then John has been on his own, living off the grid. Because of that, Skynet has been unable to find him, and instead sends back a T-X Terminator (Kristanna Loken) to kill the people who would become John's lieutenants in the future war. It turns out that John and Sarah had not prevented Judgment Day, they'd merely postponed it from 1997 to 2004. Another Terminator, a T-850 (Arnold Schwarzenegger), has been sent to 2004 to protect John as well as his lieutenants, though the T-X managed to kill several of them. After a motorcycle accident late one night (or rather very early morning), not wanting to go to a hospital, John breaks into a veterinary clinic to steal some medicine. A woman who works there, named Kate Brewster (Claire Danes), is called in to check out the disturbance, I guess. She finds John and manages to lock him in a cage, but then both Terminators show up. John manages to free himself, and... things really get crazy from there. Kate turns out to be one of the lieutenants the T-X had been sent to kill, in fact John's second in command. So the Terminator has to protect both of them, while fleeing from the T-X in a series of different vehicles. For a large part of the film, Kate just thinks she's been kidnapped and doesn't believe the truth about the future. But she is eventually convinced.

They find out that another person the T-X wants to kill is Kate's father, Lt. General Robert Brewster, the head of the Cyber Research Systems department of the Air Force, which has taken over the Skynet A.I., since Cyberdyne no longer exists. There's a computer virus that's been creating a lot of problems throughout the country, and the military wants to use Skynet to fight the virus, but that means giving it control of the military's own computer system. Brewster is reluctant to do this, but is eventually ordered to do so. And once Skynet is activated, Judgment Day (that same day) is inevitable. Of course, John and the others still try to stop it.

And that's all I want to say about the plot. There's plenty more to the story, and tons of action. It's all okay. In fact it's hard for me to say why I like this movie less than the first two. But I just do. Still, I'm glad to have seen it again, and I kind of wish I'd seen it closer to my watching the fourth movie. Although I'm not sure if this movie is officially part of any continuity that comes after it. I know the sixth movie (which I haven't seen yet) is a direct sequel to Terminator 2, so it ignores this movie, as well as the fourth and fifth (the latter of which I also haven't seen yet). But I guess it's possible the fourth and fifth movies don't ignore this movie's events. I'm not sure I care one way or the other, though.