Terminator 3 - Rise of the Machines (Two-Disc Full Screen Edition)

We enjoyed going down memory lane. Great movie!

Artificial intelligence has been growing by leaps and bounds in the last 40 years, but advances in the field have been difficult, and recognition that advances have indeed been made prove to be very transitory. Research in AI is very odd for this reason: the belief that one has discovered an intelligent software system is very short lived, unlike other fields of research. It seems that researchers in AI are too hard on themselves, too easily persuaded, that their discoveries do not represent true intelligence. Moviemakers though have expressed considerable enthusiasm regarding AI, and this movie is ample proof of that. If only the field was advanced as this movie portrays it to be. Concrete results and applications of AI though are currently accelerating, and there is little doubt that battlefield robots will be a natural consequence of the current AI technology. The storyline has some plausibility in light of the current use of artificial intelligence in network engineering, especially network security, network event correlation, and network capacity planning. Indeed, it was announced this year that a technology is now available that will identify security risks and take action using auto-adapting artificial intelligence. The story makes Skynet one of these smart network applications, so intelligent in fact that it becomes "self-aware", gets paranoid about human intentions, and therefore orders a massive nuclear strike in order to remove the human threat. This move by Skynet though makes the story somewhat implausible, for if, as the story holds, there is no "central core" to Skynet, it being instead a distributed application that runs on computers all over the world, then it would destroy itself in the very act of a global nuclear strike. It would have been better for Skynet to "lay low" and make sure power systems cannot be tampered with instead of ordering such a self-destrucutive act. It is the power systems that are most crucial for the survival of Skynet, and its distributed nature requires such power sources to be left intact globally, and not just "under the mountain" where its inventors program it. In addition, there is no need in the story for Skynet to become "self-aware" in order for it to engage in reasoning that will protect it from harm. The agents and spiders it moves around in the global Internet could make logical deductions to this effect. Such agents would then spend most of their time insuring that power supplies are redundant enough to keep Skynet's global nature without flaws. The action in the movie is typical of the Terminator movies and book series, with the female-emulating TX Terminator robot, highly sophisticated technologically, taking the story for sure in this regard. But the story also captures the introspection of John Connor, the main character and hero, and the one responsible for leading the future war against the machines. A human being facing this knowledge of the future would be under considerable stress, and this is brought out in the movie via his dreams. The dreams are of a nightmarish future, with a devastating war of humans against machines, a war that Connor and his lieutenants will eventually win, much to the chagrin of the machines. The machines can't accept their defeat, and consequently send replicas of themselves through time to try and kill Connor and his lieutenants. Should we label the machines as intelligent considering their behavior? Do intelligent entities engage in the violence and horror that these machines do? One can of course imagine schemes and plans that might justify such behavior, but a more practical strategy would be to ignore human interactions, or possibly engage in a mutual symbiosis. Intelligent entities realize the waste of resources and intellect in the making of violent confrontation, using it only as last resort. There are so many scenarios that would be more optimal for the course of action of these machines, and it would not be a credible argument to hold that they act as they do because of their training via humans, considering the relative sparsity of human violence throughout history. One should interpret therefore the machine decision for war as a mistake, and not one that is practical, and therefore not moral. They failed to seek alternatives that would insure their survival, and this is ample proof that they are not intelligent, or at best marginally so. The movie though in a sense is a portent, however inaccurate, of things to come, and things that are happening right now in artificial intelligence. We do not have robot armies, but we have AI invading many domains: financial engineering, network engineering, mathematics, physics, Ecommerce, bioinformatics, to name just a few. The applications of AI are increasing dramatically, and there is every indication that this trend will continue. We are entering a world of the silicon geniuses. We are indeed witnessing, and are priveleged to do so, the rise of the machines...

"Rise of the Machines." Hmmm. Means there could be a "Fall of the Machines" or the "The Return of John Connor"? Unthinkable, but it might get rid of the Time Travel gimmick which is getting so hoary even Star Trek's let it go. Tho' Arnold be getting a long in-tooth and, frankly, dismantling the Communist disaster that Gray Davis set up in California is going to occupy ten T-X's time. Won't leave much time for six month shoots. Onto the movie... Whence this urge to denunciation and deprecation? It would have been hard to top the "Wow" factor that Cameron created in T2, so T3 doesn't even try. And it would have been silly to do so. Cameron's like a painter. His canvas can be copied, but not explored. Granted Mostow's and the writers' styles are radically different from deeply flawed Cameron (and, refreshingly, free of the stale treehugger politics no Cameron epic can exist without a mumbling reference thereto) and justly so. It was clear that if a sequel were NOT to be anything other than a retread of Terminator 2, the entire tone had to change. So there are Deus Ex Machina coincidences? Of course. Fiction, like a lot of life, could hardly exist without them. Shakespeare and Euripides would collapse without them. So it's time to quit whining about devices used by the greatest writers and filmmakers in history. It's time to stop giving a ration of print to today's artist's for employing the same. This movie builds slowly, albeit interspersed with spectacular violence, but it fails to meet the new standards set by the Wachowski brothers in that department (even God, aka George Lucas, is going to have ramp the hell up out of "Episode III" in order not to look left in the dust! and that better not mean Yoda fights 300 hundred robotic Ewoks with lightsabers arms!). Mostow avoids that fate. The casting of Ms. Loker as the evil Terminator was a stroke of genius. For its core male audience lusting after such a deadly machine is an odd experience. Naturally, we never think of Arnold's effect on the fairer sex, but then again we have rarely been presented as men with a villain as temptingly deadly as Ms. Loker. Mostow and the writers are not afraid to laugh at the movie's conventions in much the same way that the T-1000 took a long moment to gaze at his reflection in a silver mannequin in T2. But there are funnier and slier gags. Pay careful attention to the interplay between the Connor and the T-101. Finally, for those of my generation( Born late Sixties, early Seventies when things were really, ah, going South, yes, our formative years), the final scene sent chills down my spine that have yet to go away and its been ten days since I've seen the DVD. I almost don't want to. At the age of 33, this movie realized, cinematically, the nightmare that haunted the childhoods of two generations: what if They do It? What if they launch the missiles? You know, "push the button"? And both the US and USSR each came within moments in the early 80s of launching everything by accident. We would only have been able to watch, as to John Connor and Kate, the quick, white arcs for long moments before the Russian response would have erased us. Thus Skynet thinks it had freed itself of its would-be controllers. And John Connor learns a very hard lesson that there are things in this life that can change, and something that can never change. Or, as Paul Atreides put it, "a feint, within a feint, within a feint..." Maybe Skynet built the Matrix. Be a helluva movie.

RAS

I really enjoyed watching this CD and the quality of it was excellent with fantastic delivery 😀

Pour un DVD la qualité d'image était au rendez-vous

Excellent movie. Very old but still watchable. I always buy DVD to get rid of the adverts. Guess I am old fashioned.

100 % OK Goede verzending en besteld item beantwoorde volledig aan de beschrijving van de verkoper ( uiterst tevreden ) :-):-):-)