Terminator 3: The Coming Storm

I appreciate Uncanny Antman removing the dumber moments of this movie, trying to bring the tone closer to the movies that came before. But at the end of the day, I don't think this edit changes enough to make it worthwhile going out of your way to watch. The movie itself just kind of undermines the point of the two previous movies. Unless you can get around that, this movie won't be worth watching. The original movies were about creating your own destiny and eschewing determinism. This movie just says, "Well, everything still happens anyway. There's no changing anything."

If Terminator: Dark Fate didn't exist, I'd probably be more inclined to recommend this edit because I would've thought it would be the best we were gonna get. But Dark Fate was basically the movie this should've been.

The editing itself on this is excellent. I knew when things were cut just because of remembering them from the original movie, but I didn't notice any jarring cuts or transitions. It all seemed very well done to me. Unfortunately, it just wasn't different enough. It still felt mostly just like the same movie but slightly better due to some omissions here and there.

This is a solid alternative to a significantly dated and flawed movie. Terminators act like their function dictates they should, cornier jokes and callbacks are omitted. It's not a movie I tend to reflect on with much fondness (even though, gullible me, I saw it twice in theatres), but this is an edit Antman can reflect on with pride as it manages to become T3's "Salvation". This is his edit's judgement day, and it is spared a dark fa...(ok, I'm stop with the lousy title puns now)

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As said in this Podcast episode: https://youtu.be/djrZ2RE1gM4

The editing is solid. A+.

This for me fixes Terminator 3. Does it make it perfect? Of course not but it makes it closer in tone to the first two and makes the overall story much better. Cuts down on most of the cheese and makes the Terminators act more like well Terminators. Also helps make John less of a clueless dumb ass.

Should also be noted the copy I got had a borked 5.1 track where the center channel was in the back.... I had to re-encode with Handbrake as a flat Stereo track. Not even Pro-Logic would fix this issue.

If you didn't like T3, you might like this. If you already liked T3 you'll probably love this. I say check it out.

I've never seen Terminator 3. I've not avoided it, but the opportunity never came up and since it wasn't meant to be very good I didn't really seek it out. I'd heard a lot of good things about this edit though, so I decided to go out and buy a copy of the film just to check out The Coming Storm. So, Uncanny Antman's cut is my first experience of the film.

Visual editing - Almost perfect. There was only one cut that I noticed and that was when a conversation between John and the girl suddenly ends (having read the cut list afterwards, I'm assuming this is where they kiss or talk about kissing or something like that). It wasn't actually a bad cut. I wouldn't go as far as to describe it as jarring, but it just seemed fairly obvious that the scene was meant to play out longer. I watched this with four other people who had all seen the film before (although quite some time ago) and none of them found the cuts noticeable. One person spotted the convo cut at the same time as me.

Audio editing – fine. Nothing noticeable.

Narrative – here's where things fall apart. Obviously, I haven't seen the original movie (which I will be doing just to compare), but from reading the cut list and a couple of other reviews it sounds like there were scenes cut that would be responsible for hindering the narrative. One of the main issues is that characters just keep popping up out of nowhere without being properly introduced. The girl (I'm terrible with names), her father and her fiance could all have done with an earlier introduction. Maybe the scene that does this was cringy, I don't know, but regardless, if removing a scene is going to hinder the narrative then it's better to leave it in IMO. The whole Skynet thing seemed a bit out of the blue as well. The terminator clearly uploads something to the machines, but we don't know what. Things just seem to start going wrong and it's not exactly clear why. I'm assuming this probably has to do with the virus plotline which the editor chose to cut out a large chunk of.

Enjoyment – Never seen the original, but this certainly felt like it could have been a lot worse. Reading the cut list certainly made me cringe at what I potentially could have been exposed to. My chief concerns were with the narrative, but outside of that it was quite a fun ride. The film itself is pointless, but it has a good ending and it kind of fixes the plot holes created in T2 (if Skynet is stopped then John Connor never sends Kyle Reese back and therefore John is not born.).

So, why did I watch this before watching the original? Well, I had no interest in watching the original. But this edit was supposedly meant to make it good. So I thought, if I'm going to watch it, I may as well watch a version that I'm more likely to enjoy. I was also just generally curious to experience a fan edit of something I had no familiarity with; to see if I could tell that it had been tampered with and if I could spot cuts without having knowledge of what would have been removed. Turns out the narrative suffers quite a bit, and I'm not entirely sure this could have been given the go ahead as an official release - then again... fanedit.org exists for a reason :P . Despite apparent flaws though, I did enjoy it and it's sparked my interest in the theatrical release.

I imagine The Coming Storm is probably much better than the original movie, but after reading the cut list I'm also fairly certain stuff that shouldn't have been cut was taken out. I plan on watching the original for comparison, and then I will probably come back and update my review. Would I recommend this edit? That remains to be seen.