History Film / Terminator3RiseOfTheMachines

* BrokenAesop: "There is no fate but what we make for ourselves"...[[spoiler: except for the robot apocalypse. That'll happen no matter what.]]

* [[spoiler:DownerEnding: After spending the whole film trying to avert TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt, the heroes fail at the end. Of course, T-850 knew it would happen all along.]]
** [[spoiler:Possibly more of a BittersweetEnding: John and Kate have failed to stop Judgement day, and the machines nearly wipe out all life on earth, but John finally accepts his destiny as leader of the resistance, and begins his long journey to the eventual defeat of Skynet]].

* YouCanFightFate: The previous movie tried to imply [[ScrewDestiny the future is not set]]. This time, it's clear Judgment Day is inevitable, [[StableTimeLoop that all outcomes foretold by Kyle Reese are inevitable.]] Of course, many of John Connor's future revolution partners wound up killed before doing so, [[TimeyWimeyBall but this kind of thing comes with time travel.]]

* PlotHole: The movie contradicts the first two's idea that the future is not set by saying that Judgment Day is inevitable, that all outcomes foretold by Kyle Reese are inevitable. If so, the T-X or Skynet should be unable to kill John Connor or Kate or any of Connor's important Lieutenants until their time is actually up, as a result sending a Terminator back in time to kill all of these people is an exercise in futility. This massive plot hole carries over to the fourth film.

* {{Retcon}}: Nice job of accounting for the development of the internet and distributed computing, which arose between the second and third films.

* GroinAttack: During the fight between T-X and T-850, the female Terminator grabs and squeezes his nuts and then [[SuperStrength lifts his body as if he's just a styrofoam]] before she ram him to some fences. Could be considered funny when you realizes this happened in a toilet.

In the aftermath of Terminator2JudgmentDay, the Connors appear to have prevented [=SkyNet=]'s takeover: the date Reese cited for Judgment Day has come and gone, and an adult John Connor lives off the grid to make sure no one (including Terminators) can track him down. But out of the blue, another shapeshifting Terminator, a T-X Model with a female appearance, shows up to carry out a specific mission: kill John Connor and as many of his future Resistance lieutenants as possible. A T-850 Model Terminator (functionally similar to the T-800, but with a few minor upgrades), reprogrammed to protect John Connor, also shows up.

* TwistEnding: [[spoiler:Judgement Day ''is'' inevitable, and we get to watch TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt. The purpose of the Terminator, and Kate's father, was to ensure the two of them survived the apocalypse.]]
* VanityIsFeminine: The T-X (a female "Terminatrix") walks past a mirror while battling the male T-850, and her head immediately whips to the side for as long as she's reflected in it. There was no reason offered for why she'd do this in the middle of a fight (aside from the obvious point of this trope) and it [[FreezeFrameBonus happens so fast that many viewers likely missed it.]]

* TwistEnding

In the aftermath of Terminator2JudgementDay, the Connors appear to have prevented [=SkyNet=]'s takeover: the date Reese cited for Judgment Day has come and gone, and an adult John Connor lives off the grid to make sure no one (including Terminators) can track him down. But out of the blue, another shapeshifting Terminator, a T-X Model with a female appearance, shows up to carry out a specific mission: kill John Connor and as many of his future Resistance lieutenants as possible. A T-850 Model Terminator (functionally similar to the T-800, but with a few minor upgrades), reprogrammed to protect John Connor, also shows up.

The Connors appear to have prevented [=SkyNet=]'s takeover: the date Reese cited for Judgment Day has come and gone, and an adult John Connor lives off the grid to make sure no one (including Terminators) can track him down. Another shapeshifting Terminator, a T-X Model with a female appearance, shows up out of the blue to carry out a specific mission: kill John Connor and as many of his future Resistance lieutenants as possible. A T-850 Model Terminator (functionally similar to the T-800, but powered by [[MadeOfExplodium hydrogen fuel-cells which explode if ruptured]]), reprogrammed to protect John Connor, also shows up.

John, who resents everything about what his late mother Sarah told him about the future and raised him to become, eventually returns to the fight alongside his wife-to-be, Kate Brewster, and the T-850. After he narrowly fails to prevent the activation of [=SkyNet=], John decides to destroy the AI's computer core before it can initiate Judgment Day. The head of the [=SkyNet=] project, Kate's father, gives John and Kate the address and entrance codes for a military bunker that he calls their "only hope". After a final battle with the T-X and a sacrifice from the T-850, the couple manages to enter the bunker...where they discover a nuclear fallout shelter instead of a computer core. The government developed [=SkyNet=] as a piece of '''software''' that can run on any computer network; [[YouAreTooLate by the time the Connors reached the bunker, nobody could have stopped SkyNet]]. The Connors had only deferred, not prevented, Judgment Day. After the initial nuclear strike, John and Kate to use the communications nexus in the bunker to coordinate the emerging human resistance. As the film ends, [=SkyNet=] launches its takeover and annihilates every major world government with a tactical nuclear strike.

* GroinAttack: During the fight between T-X and T-850, the female Terminator grabs and squeezes his nuts and then lifts his body as if he's just a styrofoam before she ram him to some fences. Could be considered funny when you realizes this happened in a toilet.
** Of course, he's a cyborg and may not even feel anything from this, even if the attacker is a cyborg as well. But strangely enough, after this attack, the female Terminator is seemingly overwhelms him even more although before that happens, she's already stronger than him because she's created with more advanced technology.

* DepartmentOfRedundancyDepartment: When SkyNet goes online, someone says that it's processing at 60 teraflops a second. So, that's 60.000.000.000.000 floating point operations per second a second.

* GroinAttack: During the fight between T-X and T-850, the female Terminator grabs and squeezes his nuts and then lifts his body as if he was just a styrofoam before she ram him to the some fences. Could be considered funny when you realizes this happened in a toilet.
** Of course, he's not human and may not feel anything from this attack. But strangely enough, after this attack, the female Terminator is seemingly overwhelms him even more although before that happens, she's already stronger than him because she's created with more advanced technology.

!This film provides examples of:

* SwissArmyAppendage: The T-X has one of these: the liquid metal lets it be a normal hand, else it can fold about into a variety of weapons. The ones we see used are a plasma cannon, a nanomachine injector, and a flamethrower, but her navigational screen indicates there are around two dozen alternates.

* PlotHole: Numerous.
** [=SkyNet=] is online and infecting the entire internets. We must stop [=SkyNet=] getting online, or it will infect the...huh?
*** [[YouShouldKnowThisAlready They were trying to stop [=SkyNet=] from taking over the]] ''[[YouShouldKnowThisAlready military]]''.
** The movie contradicts the first two's idea that the future is not set by saying that Judgment Day is inevitable, that all outcomes foretold by Kyle Reese are inevitable. If so, the T-X or Skynet should be unable to kill John Connor or Kate or any of Connor's important Lieutenants until their time is actually up, as a result sending a Terminator back in time to kill all of these people is an exercise in futility. This massive plot hole carries over to the fourth film.
** How exactly did the military rebuild Skynet, and it's stated to be the exact same system, if all of the information on the system and the technology used to create it was destroyed in the second film? In essence, how did the military rebuild something out of nothing?
** They had the original technology. During his fight with the T-1000, the T-800 loses an arm in a set of gears. THAT arm is never melted. Only the original arm, and the rest of the t-800. And since all Cyberdyne needed to build skynet in the first place was a T-800 arm...
*** They also had a chip, not just the arm.
**** I assumed the military actually ''created'' [=SkyNet=], and the first Terminator going back created a StableTimeLoop where Cyberdyne created it ''first''.

The Connors appear to have prevented [=SkyNet=]'s takeover: the date Reese cited for Judgment Day has come and gone, and an adult John Connor lives off the grid to make sure no one (including Terminators) can track him down. Another shapeshifting Terminator, a T-X Model with a female appearance, shows up out of the blue to carry out a specific mission: kill John Connor and as many of his future Resistance lieutenants as possible. A T-850 Model Terminator (functionally similar to the T-800, but powered by [[MadeOfExplodium hydrogen fuel-cells which explode if ruptured]]), reprogrammed to protect John Connor, also shows up. John, who resents everything about what his late mother Sarah told him about the future and raised him to become, eventually returns to the fight alongside his wife-to-be, Kate Brewster, and the T-850. After he narrowly fails to prevent the activation of [=SkyNet=], John decides to destroy the AI's computer core before it can initiate Judgment Day. The head of the [=SkyNet=] project, Kate's father, gives John and Kate the address and entrance codes for a military bunker that he calls their "only hope". After a final battle with the T-X and a sacrifice from the T-850, the couple manages to enter the bunker...where they discover a nuclear fallout shelter instead of a computer core. The government developed [=SkyNet=] as a piece of '''software''' that can run on any computer network; [[YouAreTooLate by the time the Connors reached the bunker, nobody could have stopped SkyNet]]. The Connors had only deferred, not prevented, Judgment Day. After the initial nuclear strike, John and Kate to use the communications nexus in the bunker to coordinate the emerging human resistance. As the film ends, [=SkyNet=] launches its takeover and annihilates every major world government with a tactical nuclear strike.