Welcome to 5 Favorites. Each week, I will put together a list of my 5 favorites (films, performances, whatever strikes my fancy) along with commentary on a given topic each week, usually in relation to a specific film releasing that week.
This week, one of the most popular filmmakers in history releases his sequel to the 2009 blockbuster Avatar. Avatar: The Way of Water is said to be rather impressive and could play well with the Academy. Yet, before that, Cameron did great things with other films, all but one of the best of which were science-fiction films. Not much you can say about a name almost everyone knows. Here are my five favorite James Cameron films.
Aliens (1986)
After Ridley Scott gave us the ultimate sci-fi horror film, Alien, Cameron gave us the ultimate sci-fi action film in Aliens. Bringing back the lone survivor from the original film, Cameron continued the story of Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) who is brought with an expedition to investigate the mysterious lost signal of a colony she had claimed was infested with aliens. The crew head out into deep space only to find that Ellen’s warnings have borne fruit and they are once again beset by the alien creatures that slaughtered the crew of her prior ship and are now trying to infest this new one.
The original film was a big success and even managed to nab a pair of Oscar nominations for its trouble for Art Direction and Visual Effects, winning the latter. The 1986 sequel, however, performed fairly similarly at the box office, but easily outpaced Scott’s film, securing seven nominations including a rare acting citation for Weaver, and the first film’s two categories plus Film Editing, Original Score, Sound, and Sound Effects Editing. It won for Sound Effects Editing and again for Visual Effects. Thus spawned a successful franchise with films of decreasing quality over the years and helped solidify Cameron’s status as one of the foremost filmmakers of his generation.
The Abyss (1989)
Having found a home in science fiction, Cameron’s next project was another self-written feature set deep in the Caribbean ocean, a place the director seems to have an affinity for. Ed Harris, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and Michael Biehn star in the film about a search and rescue crew that partners up with the workers on an oil rig to go after a sunken submarine in a race against a Soviet team. As various impediments rise up to foil their plans, they are soon beset by mysterious happenings and something foreign is thought to be hiding in the deep.
The Abyss was a solid box office success and was nominated for four Academy Awards for Art Direction, Cinematography, Sound, and the only award it won, Visual Effects. It was the first signs of a trend of Cameron creating films that win Oscars for Visual Effects, which has happened for all five films on this week’s list. It was clear from early on that Cameron was as much a forward thinker in terms of visual effects as his contemporary, Steven Spielberg. While Spielberg has shifted into a more serious direction, Cameron remains fascinated by effects-heavy pictures, which is evinced by the 13-year production lead time before the release of this week’s sequel.
No original review available.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
While it could be said that Cameron cut his teeth on his early feature work, like Piranha II, it’s more accurate to say that he became the director he is today thanks in large part to the success of the prequel to this particular title. In 1984, The Terminator caught audiences by surprise as the met Arnold Schwarzeneggar as a cyborg sent back in time by an out of control artificial intelligence to track down and kill a woman whose child will rise up to lead the resistance against the A.I. Michael Biehn, who would briefly become a Cameron regular, playing a soldier whose task is to follow the Terminator and protect the woman, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton).
Hamilton and Schwarzeneggar return, this time with Schwarzeneggar sent back to protect Sarah’s son John (Edward Furlong) from a more advanced cyborg out (Robert Patrick) to kill him . With this new cyborg, Cameron upped his visual effects game creating a villain that had the ability to liquify and re-form body parts as a form of self-repair. This creates a unique threat against which our heroes now fight. While The Abyss could be argued as one of Cameron’s weaker scripts, Terminator 2 was a surprisingly adroit feature building on the concepts of the original film and twisting just enough to surprise the audience at regular intervals. It was a visual delight, winning four Academy Awards for Makeup, Sound, Sound Effects Editing, and Visual Effects along with two other non-winning nominations for Cinematography and Film Editing.
Titanic (1997)
Any director with a slate of high profile blockbusters wants to step away from that and make a prestige picture every once in awhile. Cameron was no different, but he raised the bar on how that could be done and still stay true to your blockbuster aesthetic. Titanic is set aboard the ill-fated passenger liner RMS Titanic. While he could have told any one of a number of tales from aboard the doomed ship, he settled on a fictional tale centered around wealthy heiress Rose (Kate Winslet) who falls in love with impoverished steerage class passenger Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio), much to the consternation of nearly everyone, including a haughty suitor (Billy Zane). Their affair is obviously star-crossed as the Titanic would sink on its maiden voyage across the northern Atlantic.
All of this is bookended by a preset day-set exploration of the Titanic wreckage by a research vessel captained by Bill Pullman and assisted by 101-year-old Rose (Gloria Stuart). All of this was written as a way to highlight the various undersea efforts to document the underwater wreckage of the ship and give Cameron the opportunity to envisage the liner on the big screen in a gorgeous and richly detailed set. The recreation of the Titanic was bound to catch Oscar’s attention, especially with the eye for detail Cameron put into it. What wasn’t on anyone’s radar was how well the film would play with audiences, ultimately becoming the highest gross (non-inflation adjusted) film of all time. It was nominated for a record-tying 14 Academy Awards and won a record-tying 11.
Avatar (2009)
Heading back to the blockbuster, Cameron settled on a narrative of anti-imperialistic, pro-environmentalism. Avatar was set on a remote planet called Pandora where a human colonial effort has been set up to mine a precious ore called unobtainium (original he is not). This operation threatens a local indigenous tribe called the Na’vi. Through a scientific process that connects Na’vi-human hybrids called avatars to human operators, a group of scientists explores the area ultimately realizing there’s more to the supposedly primitive species than meets the eye, setting up a conflict between the mining conglomerate and compassionate scientists.
Weaver makes a return to Cameron’s films taking on the role of the lead scientist while Sam Worthington plays her bodyguard who falls in love with one of the Na’vi. Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez, and Giovanni Ribisi co-star in human/hybrid guise while Zoe Saldaña, CCH Pounder, and Wes Studi star as Na’vi. The performances were passable, an aspect of Cameron’s filmmaking that doesn’t always hold up to scrutiny, but the effects were marvelous. At the time of release 3D technology was relatively limited and had just began to rise in popularity. Cameron managed to embolden the technology with unparalleled use of it. Once again Cameron had a box office success toppling his own Titanic and becoming the highest grossing film of all-time, a record it’s been struggling to keep, but which is of course not adjusted for inflation. Once again, his film was nominated for a lot of Oscars, nine of them with only Picture and Directing above-the-line and the rest in craft categories. The film won three for Art Direction, Cinematography, and Visual Effects.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.