I agree, T3 was great.
What? No! I meant that T3 was ****ing abyssmal!!
Honestly, not only did they completly destroy the premise of the first two movies as an0n pointed out, but they turned SKYNET into a ****ing joke! In T1, it was a military computer that achieved sentience saw humanity as a threat, and thus decided that for SKYNET to survive, humanity must not. T2 ellaborated on that and really gave SKYNET some actual character development, giving it a sympathetic light in that it was only trying to defend its new-found sentience when its designers tried to destroy it. And then along came T3, which made it into some supar-evil program that managed to operate and manipulate its designers even when it wasn't turned on, and then decided to effectively destroy most of itself [as it had no system-core and was entirely software, apparently] by destroying civilisation. T3 cut the balls off SKYNET with a rusty razor, and hence I loathe that ****ing movie.
Had they made it into something
cool, T3 could have been awesome. Instead the writers decided to take the existing story and wipe it in their collective asses, before prettying it up with arbitrary special effects and sending it out the door to the drooling masses who wouldn't know 'quality' if it took a **** in the middle of their lounge-rooms.