Terminator 3 has been so royally dissed by everyone. Except maybe Times of India, and who believes those old fogies anyway? Just one of those slam-bang-poof Summer Blockbusters, with no storyline and lots of explosions and good ol’ Ah-nold with his good ol’ stony face.

Hey, I liked it. Not all of it, but yeah, I liked the premise. I liked the idea of John Connor being a whiny loser, and I liked Arnie’s dialogues(Reminded me that Hemant Birje could have made it big in Hollywood). The explosions were neat, too. I hope they mass-manufacture Kristina Lokken lookalike Terminatrixes in the future.

Funnily, the idea of a lethal female Terminatrix goes back a long way. 1990, to be precise, when Alex Ross, painter and graphic artist extraordinaire brought out Terminator: The Burning Earth, a five issue comic-book series. This told the story of the final fight, John Connor and his rebel army’s last stand against Skynet. The computer is about to launch a final nuke assault on an already-ravaged human race, this time to make sure that there are no survivors, and Connor has to fight his way through a Terminator-guarded mountain to the computer’s core and shut it down. Of course, the Terminators, even though female, had none of the morph capabilities shown in the second movie; they were Arnie-standard bots, although more dangerous. Maybe because it’s harder to hit a beautiful female wearing sunglasses than a muscular ex-Mr Universe wearing similar sunglasses. Poor, puny humans.

No mind-elevating storyline, this. But what struck me ( and in all likelihood, anyone who read this comic) was the art. Lavishly painted, presenting a bleak, sunless future. I had not seen any of the movies until then, and when I finally did, it was kind of an anticlimax. Because the future is not shown, it’s only Sarah and John in the present, and just one Terminator. Sigh! I was better off reading the comic over and over again.

Then there was the second movie which retconned the comic-book altogether. C’mon, if there was no Skynet and no Judgement Day, how can there be a Burning Earth? Unless of course, the comic is set in ( Yuck!) an alternate future.

Aah! And now T3. Everything falls into place. The threat of Judgement Day was not ended, it was only postponed, Arnie says somewhere in the movie. And the Terminator’s presence did not change the future, it made things work out exactly as it should have.

The word “fanboy” is slowly becoming obsolete. But times like this, it should be used. The movie appealed to the fanboy in me. Hurray!