By Annalee Newitz

EVERYONE HAD THE same question for me after I'd consumed Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines in one giant, flame-filled, fake butter-covered gulp.

"What," they asked, "will this do for Arnold's political career?" –Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has played a deadly Terminator cyborg in the three Terminator films, recently began positioning himself as a future Republican candidate for governor of California. And so it seemed appropriate to ask questions about his public servant potential. How will the latest installment in the atomic-Armageddon, time-travel melodrama set Arnie up in future gubernatorial campaigns?

I suppose T3 will do wonders for his extra-Hollywood aspirations, since with this movie his film career is now officially dead. But Arnie's ability to bark stale one-liners, and to come across as simultaneously vapid yet menacing, should serve him well in California politics.

In fact, disaster-prone California is where most of the action in T3 takes place. We join our hero, John Connor (Nick Stahl), 10 years after T2. Having saved the world from nuclear annihilation perpetrated by the evil A.I. Skynet, he's "living off the grid" in Los Angeles. This seems to involve a lot of bad behavior as the Lifetime TV network might interpret it: wearing a torn leather jacket, throwing beer bottles off bridges (oohhh, so nasty!), and taking his motorcycle a few miles over the speed limit.

The young John Connor of T2 (Edward Furlong) had a kind of squeaky bravado that rang true. He was the wild spawn of a feminist warrior mother and a father from the future; he was a proto-guerrilla whose role models were cyborgs and Mexican revolutionaries. But the adult John of T3, who is about to come into his own as "leader of the resistance against the machines," is whiny and sodden, the exact sort of person who would normally cross the screen as one of the expendable ensigns on Star Trek. It's hard to care about his struggle to save the future.

It's even harder to take seriously the terrible menace from the future that has come to track John down and kill him. In a series of scenes that echo the opening moments of T2, the good and bad Terminator cyborgs arrive in balls of flame – Arnie, the original Terminator model, is there to protect John from a new "anti-Terminator Terminator" model known as the T-X, or "Terminatrix" (Kristanna Loken). The surprise? T-X is – gasp! – female.

In case we don't figure out that the T-X isn't a man, though, the film offers us some helpful hints. Her time-travel device lands next to mannequins in the window of a Beverly Hills clothing boutique. I mean, duh – that's just the sort of place a woman would pick to land, right? The T-X also has one of those special powers that only girl cyborgs have: she can expand her breasts at will, as we see in an early scene in which she needlessly inflates them to distract a police officer before murdering him. Why not just cut right to the killing? Well, because she's a chick, of course. Babes always want to look good, even when they're the world's most sophisticated killing machine sent from the future to change the course of history.

Now why didn't T2 director James Cameron think of that when he created the supermorphing, evil T-1000? Think of the possibilities for dick-whipping Arnie in a fight scene!

T3's representation of the T-X – reminiscent of how the alien is depicted Species, another female-power-is-sexy-but-evil S.F. flick – is noteworthy only because it's the sequel to one of the only action movies in history with a female hero (Sarah Connor, played with macho intensity by Linda Hamilton). In the incompetent hands of director Jonathan Mostow, the T-X isn't even an antihero. She's just an ancient stereotype dressed up cyber: a tough, nasty bitch who has haunted the dreams of misogynists since some Greek guy wrote down the legend of Medusa. Just in case you didn't make that connection yourself, the T-X sprouts crawly, snakelike hair and a serpentine face during her death throes.

One might argue that T3 has a female hero in John's soon-to-be wife, Kate (Claire Danes), who sent the Terminator from the future to protect them from the T-X. There are a couple of ho-hum scenes in which Kate curses, flies an airplane, and shoots a gun, but we know she's always going to play second fiddle to John. Unlike T2's Sarah, whose intimidating physical presence mirrors that of the Terminator, Kate is merely a nice girl with gumption. She's a vet who cares about puppies and calls her daddy in a crisis. When the time comes to take command, she steps back and lets John do it, although one wonders why she should, given how mopey he is about the whole thing.

Even Arnie's Terminator suffers from gender issues. He's trapped in that "masculinity crisis" pundits were so keen on back when Basic Instinct came out in 1992. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the scene in which the Terminator emerges, naked, from his time machine. As he did in T2, the Terminator goes looking for some leather outerwear at a biker bar. We are expecting him to beat the living crap out of some Hells Angels, but instead he walks into a sleazy bar on "ladies' night." There the cyborg finds himself turned into a sex object by a roomful of squealing women who grin and point at his nonmorphable member. He winds up getting clothes from a flagrantly faggy stripper at the bar who hands them off after the Terminator threatens to squeeze his hand too hard. Dressed like a Castro clone bound for the Stud, the Terminator exists in this film seemingly only to prove he's not a homo, really he's not. No doubt this concern will resonate deeply with 13-year-old boys.

The creaky gender roles in T3 are only a few of the many unintentionally retro moments in a movie whose primary sources of anxiety – atomic bombs and "cyberspace" – are hopelessly out of touch. In the early 1980s and '90s, when T1 and T2 were released, respectively, the cold war and its implicit nuclear threat hovered over the United States like a mushroom cloud. Skynet, the evil machine intelligence behind "judgment day," represented the still-unknown potential of a global computer network.

But it's more than a decade later. The global atomic menace is as quaint as a John Hughes movie. Today, we worry about dirty bombs and localized nuclear attacks from terrorist groups. And in the wake of the dot-boom and -bust, the idea that there is something horrifying about Skynet is laughable. In one of those embarrassingly unhip moments that abound in T3, John refers to Skynet as unstoppable because it's "software in cyberspace" that is so pervasive that it has even invaded "computers in dorm rooms." So, Skynet is some kind of atomic peer-to-peer system? Sorry, but after watching Trinity use an actual hacker tool called nmap in The Matrix Reloaded, it's hard to take seriously a big-budget, computer-oriented movie that can't afford to hire a single tech-savvy consultant.

The fact is that atomic weapons and computer networks are no longer part of the terrifying, unknown future. I don't mean to downplay how real the fear of nuclear weapons is in daily life. After all, the United States recently invaded a nation based on worries about what turned out to be an imaginary nuclear weapons cache. But the rules are different in film. To be more than a mere "thrill ride," an action movie has to arouse a deep sense of awe and blank, nameless fear in its audience. To do this requires imagination. It means the director and writer have to peer into our social unconscious and address what genuinely moves us to scream: the unknowable.

Problem is, we already know too much about computer networks to buy the idea that "software in cyberspace" can hurt anyone – except, perhaps, for the Recording Industry Association of America and Motion Picture Association of America, whose tender feelings are apparently wounded constantly by digital copyright circumvention software.

The tired, old roles to which our characters are relegated – hero man, nice girlfriend, evil powerful woman, besieged father figure – also contribute to the overall blah-ness of T3. One of the most exhilarating parts of T2 was a sense that we really were glimpsing the future. Some of this had to do with the cutting-edge CGI effects, but it was also bound up with the strange, new social roles we saw in its heroes. Sarah, John, and the Terminator were a family from the future. One look at Sarah's muscle-bound body, steeled to spring into action, and you knew this was no standard S.F. explosion flick. There are absolutely no moments like this in T3. We know what's coming, and the future looks just like every other future we've seen.