James Cameron Retrospective in Retrospect

So I'm finished with my James Cameron retrospective and I finished it rather quickly thanks to owning over half of his films. I wasn't surprised by any of my reactions to these films, but it's some of the most fun I've had on this blog. I plan to finish up my Star Trek retrospective before the new year and say goodbye to something I've been taking slow because, despite my negative reaction to most of them, I've sort of loved watching them. I'm pretty sure I want to do a Kevin Smith retrospective next and maybe a John Hughes one after that, but any suggestions are more than welcome.

This post is my homebase for the James Cameron retrospective, which is now finished and can be put on the shelf, but not without a table of contents.

1. The Terminator - 11/10
2. Aliens - 10/10
3. Terminator 2: Judgment Day - 10/10
4. Avatar - 9/10
5. The Abyss - 9/10
6. True Lies - 8/10
7. Titanic - 5/10
8. Piranha II: The Spawning - stupid/10

And that's it. Just make sure it doesn't get dusty.

The Last Rainforest

First of all, I fucking called it.

Just wanted to get that out of the way before I got into anything else. All you faggots saying it looked retarded and that it was going to be the biggest flop of all time, commercially and artistically, can go to hell.

Okay, so my excuse for posting this so late: I bought my IMAX 3D tickets way the hell ahead of time, like two weeks in advance. Dragged some kids who didn't think it looked good with me to see it. As we were watching it, we leaned forward and had a little powwow session. We all three agreed that the 3D was really distracting, didn't look that good and was detrimental to the success of an otherwise very, very pretty movie.

Then we had an intermission, which the theater manager said we weren't supposed to have. Apparently they had assembled the print wrong because when it came back on the 3D looked just fine. I then made it my mission to see the film again because that unpleasant first half had messed with my perception of the film, and that was the fault of the theater owners, not the filmmakers. Also because the dicks at the IMAX 3D theaters don't let you keep the space goggles.

So the best place to start, for more than a few reasons, is the story. On the distant planet Pandora, a corporation has taken to mining for a valuable resource and has hired out mercenaries to deal with the hostile environment, namely a 10-foot tall humanoid species known as the Na'vi, the very dangerous, very tough and very intelligent dominant species of Pandora. In order to better relations, Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) has been involved in developing the Avatar Program, a program wherein a human remotely pilots a Na'vi body, grown in a vat. When one driver is killed, his twin brother Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is brought in to pilot his avatar, avatars being linked to drivers by DNA for full nervous system immersion (or some other sci-fi technobabble).

The human forces are led by the most evil man they could possibly have found for the job (Stephen Lang), who reminds me too much of my dad. He wants to use Jake's in with the Na'vi to acquire tactical data for the impending conflict. Unfortunately, Jake is being seduced by the Na'vi's natural lifestyle, in tune with the elements of Pandora, meant in no small way to remind you of Native Americans. He quickly falls in love with the strong-willed Neytiri, a hunter of the forest folk and heir to a seat of power in the Na'vi tree house gang. I don't think I'm giving anything away if I say that Jake eventually sides with the Na'vi against the humans.

This plot has come under a lot of fire for being too simple, but it works so goddamn well I don't see how the simplicity is even an issue. It's bare bones and elemental, and if there's one thing that Cameron has a real and true grasp on, it's the elemental. Col. My Dad doesn't have any redeeming human qualities, he's not even a character. He's just pure evil, not unlike Cal from Titanic. And as I said, Cameron has a problem with his leading men being ciphers, but for this film Jake Sully works perfectly and Sam Worthington's listless performance is a perfect match. It's like the performances in 2001 or Blade Runner, where the humans are intentionally played as bland archtypes to bring to the fore the personality of the environment or the other non-human elements. That the human element of the film is totally sterile is exactly the point, Jake even comments on it one scene, saying how much more surreal the human world is after spending so much time in his dreamscape. And the audience feels exactly the same. I wonder if the 3D element of the human scenes look strange and awkward on purpose, so that when we step into Pandora and it gels perfectly it feels natural and far more real, despite being a complete fantasy world.

And WHAT A FUCKING WORLD IT IS. Every plant, fern, rock or square inch of dirt pulsates with life in the most gaudy, colorful way possible. And when the lights went out and the world lit up with neon plants and fluorescent water, I had to take out my eyeballs and dunk them in a glass of water. The world may not work totally logically, but holy shit is it a wonder to look at. This may be the most stunning fantasy world ever constructed for film and my reaction to it is how I imagine people reacted to The Wizard of Oz back in the olden days. If this whole film is an excuse to give us vistas of Pandora, I am more than fine with that.

But that's not all it offers. First is, obviously, James Cameron's old pro hand at action. He stages masterful action in his sleep, which is why it's so surprising that an early chase scene through the forest (!) is pretty unspectacular, even a little bit bad. But I'll forgive that in a second for the epic climax, a battle tallying around twenty minutes that will overwhelm all five senses with the sensation of pepperjack cheese. I don't want to give anything away, but it's spectacular and if you have even a little bit of appreciation for action cinema, you're sure to love it.

And the other big thing is - hold on a second...

ZOE SALDANA FOR BEST ACTRESS

Okay. So Zoe Saldana is absolutely incredible in this film. The first truly great motion capture performance since Andy Serkis in Lord of the Rings. Her character is a combination of all the great things about actors mixed with all the great things about computer animation. It might well be one of the greatest combinations of actor and filmmaking craft towards the goal of creating a great performance. It's more than obvious that an inordinate amount of time went into animating her facial movements. Her performance is incredibly subtle, and while it's hard to say where Saldana's performance stops and the animation begins, I'd like to give equal credit to both sides. It's her strong, animalistic, sexual performance that anchors the entire film. It's a great example of a perfect performance and yet another marvelous female performance in a James Cameron film.

But the main character, if you'll excuse the faggotry, is Pandora itself. If there is an avatar in this film outside of the quite literal avatars, it's the Na'vi for Pandora. They represent the interests of the planet, commune with it and protect the balance of life, always acting with it and understanding it perfectly. It's the elemental tale of a world, not a people, fighting invaders. There are times when Pandora seems to even betray emotions.

The entire film would fall apart as anything but a visual exercise without Saldana. I'm no good at describing performances, but no female performance I have seen this year (despite being super behind, An Education isn't playing anywhere in my fucking STATE) even compares. I hope to god it isn't overlooked because it's motion captured. I hope the gorgeous production design isn't overlooked because it's in a big budget action movie. And I hope that James Cameron doesn't get overlooked for this sort of thing, the sort of thing that he's best at, that he excels at and that every other filmmaker in the world should sit down, shut up and take note of.

9/10

Rich Girl Fucks Bum: A Picture in Motion

As you may or may not know, I'm nineteen. Titanic came out at the very end of 1997 and it played all the way through the summer of '98, when I saw it at eight years old. Even at eight I was aware of the hype, but there was something else about this movie that everyone I knew (remember, we're eight) was talking about: boobs. It was a PG-13 movie that our moms were going clownshit over and would take us to and there were motherfucking boobs in it. It was like your mom giving you a bag full of boobs or chocolate boobs or some sort of metaphor that involves boobs and moms but isn't weird.

And this movie engendered a love of Kate Winslet in me and a great many other young men in my age group for owning the very first pair of boobs we ever saw. To this day, even though her skin gives away that she smokes a dozen packs of cigarettes worth of tobacco directly out of her mouth every day (like a giant bowl, you see) and she looks ten years older than she is, I still want to marry the shit out of her (Titanic isn't the only reason for that - she just so happened to play the quintessential modern romantic archetype in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the kind of woman no man of my generation can't fall in love with). My point is that I'm biased. Especially in this film, before the smoking and aging caught up with her, she is just fucking gorgeous. But you didn't come here to listen to me fantasize about Kate Winslet (unless you got here with an unusually specific Google search), you came here to listen to me bash Titanic to shit.

But that's not going to happen, really. There are a lot of things to smile about, just as much as there are things to frown about.

The tale concerns itself with some diamond that belonged to some old woman. This woman isn't just a little bit old. She is enormously old, like a powerhouse of old. So old, in fact, that when she gets the news that they recovered possessions of hers from the Titanic (!), she's throwing pottery on a wheel (!!). So in order to explain what old-timey porn starring her was doing on the Titanic, she tells the story of her love affair with a young man named Jack Dawson.

So the younger men listening to her tale climb into her brain and ride it back to the year 1912, where a baseball cost a penny and eating a sandwich was a leap of faith. There, the old woman, named Rose DeWitt Bukater, has been replaced by a voluptuous, young Kate Winslet. She's a member of high society and she has been promised to a man named Cal (Billy Zane), a rich coal baron or something who she has but middling feelings for. And that's where she meets Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and their love affair begins.

I suppose I'll begin with Cal. Picking on Billy Zane is like picking on a bowl of fruit, but holy shit he deserves it. As much blame goes on Cameron for what happened here, but we'll get to that in a minute. Cal is a man of such mustache-twirling evil that I half expected them to blame HIM for the sinking of the Titanic. Billy Zane plays the role like he's playing fucking Dracula, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a deleted scene (wait for the special edition that's sure to come out!) of him floating around, scaring children. There have been a lot of over the top performances in Cameron's filmography, but Zane buys out the bake sale.

Like I said, a lot of it is Cameron's fault. Somehow, Cameron convinced himself that writing this movie wasn't lightyears outside of his particular area of talent, and his long-running handicap of being unable to really define a lot of his characters (especially his supporting characters) becomes some sort of amputation. He's the only credited writer AND director, so I'll give him all the blame I can for writing Cal like some sort of costume drama Skeletor.

Now let's discuss how detrimental he is to the plot. I get that Rose's mother is desperate to marry her off so that they can reclaim the family fortune, but is there a guy who wouldn't list "murder" as one of his interests on an eHarmony profile? That they plan to marry her off and expect her to live through the honeymoon is pretty astounding, and that Rose doesn't say something like "no" when asked to marry No Heart goes to show that maybe she isn't the super tough, girl power girl that James Cameron wrote her to be.

I write all this in half jest. I realize that Rose tries to kill herself early on in the movie and she's pretty quick to take a hobo in over Cal, but still, his performance and character are so over the top it's like he accidentally wandered off the set of a James Bond film.

Leonardo DiCaprio's performance is an example of one of those performances that isn't really a performance. Since this film was aimed squarely at women, and it was a romance, the idea was to get the women to fall in love with DiCaprio. Therefore, the marketing campaign's main goal was to push him as a sex symbol, but a sweet and innocent one. By the time they saw the movie, all the girls will already be in love with him and it hardly matters what happens in the movie, they'll still feel swept away by him. Therefore, his performance can't be too different from his modern persona, and it isn't. It's pretty carefully done to make it fit in with the time period, but he comes across as a turn of the century Backstreet Boy. And he's sort of a blank slate, a recurring theme in James Cameron's leading men. Usually that's because they're an audience surrogate (I was going to say avatar but that would have been JUST IRONIC!), but in this case it's so that too much personality doesn't get in the way of the audience's imaginary love affair.

Kate Winslet fairs much better, obviously, her being a great actress and James Cameron being a great director of women. She's strong but naive and spoiled and blah blah blah, but Winslet brings an intense human edge to the character and a naive joyfulness as she begins to discover the wonders of infatuation.

The first half is romance, the second half is ship sinking.

The second half is pretty good stuff if you're into that sort of thing, but for my money there's a lot of "people running around in circles screaming" on the deck and "flooded hallway" below deck. It works, but it feels a bit stale to me. There are occasional hints of what greatness could have been achieved with this sequence aside from the staggering technical achievement, specifically a handful of shots that make the passenger's quarters look like a haunted house, and a scene with a rather trigger-happy guard. Aside from the technicals, Cameron only succeeds occasionally at creating a sense of chaos. For my money, Cameron has achieved technical brilliance with more successful scenes in the past.

Strangely enough, the scenes that work the best are after the ship has sunk, when the survivors are floating in the water, freezing to death. In spite of its overwrought dialogue, the scene works well because of its strict finality, and Jack's death was pretty shockingly unromanticized. Oh yeah, there were spoilers in that last sentence.

So look at that, another groundbreaking technical achievement gimped by Cameron's own script. This one more so due to some pretty unconvincing performances and the fact that I'm a man with testosterone.

5/10

Lie To Me

When I mentioned that Cameron's films get lite and poppy after The Abyss, I specifically had True Lies in mind. While it is made with consummate professionalism and has some really swell performances, it's the sort of film that can only disappoint you if you've just watched four films of such high quality as The Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss and Terminator 2. But who could keep that up?

If it weren't for Cameron behind the camera this would be an utterly disposable, forgettable mid-90s Schwarzenegger vehicle, but it's to Cameron's credit that the film works so well. Specifically his rapport with Schwarzenegger and his natural ability to direct women. Frankly, though, it strikes me as the first film since Piranha II that Cameron didn't give his heart and soul to. The action is too similar to Terminator 2's for me to get too worked up over it, featuring lots of car chases with exploding cars and big ol' shootouts, but it lacks the sci-fi angle of T2 that made it so unique and ultimately loses a lot of its value. It just becomes more mundane.

So the story goes something like, Schwarzenegger is Harry Tasker: Secret Agent, but his wife, Helen Tasker (Curtis) thinks he's a boring computer salesman. When their marriage seems to be on the rocks and Helen appears to be having an affair with a used car salesman pretending to be a secret agent, it can only be rescued by some sitcom-style antics and some high-flying adventure.

The angle Cameron seems to have approached this film with is "comedy", which brings me to the movie's biggest fuck-up: Tom Arnold. He plays the comic sidekick and holy shit do I hate Tom Arnold. Tom Arnold is listed as a natural disaster and every time he releases a movie the National Weather Service issues a warning. Tom Arnold can't tie his shoes and every morning has to visit the knot store. The #1 presser of Tom Arnold DVDs are craft rooms at nursing homes. If Tom Arnold were a planet, he would be the sun, expanded to red giant and sucking up Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. Tom Arnold is one of history's (and Middle-Earth's) greatest villains.

Phew. Now that we've gotten that out of the way, let me talk about the things that do work. Aside from Tom Arnold raining Hellfire on the film, most of the actors are really funny, and oddly enough, none of them are noted for their comedy work (unlike Tom Arnold, noted for his comic terrorism). Schwarzenegger, Jaimie Lee Curtis and Bill Paxton are great, Paxton in particular giving a performance only topped a few years later by A Simple Plan. These are the only two performances where I don't think his presence is a detriment to the movie. I always laugh when we're first introduced to him in this film, where he's dolled up like a sex offender with his mustache and over-combed hair. He makes a great counterpoint to Schwarzenegger's cartoon secret agent as a cartoon secret agent in the same tradition, but with an added sexual predator and somehow less credibility.

Best in show is clearly Jaimie Lee Curtis, who gives an inspired comic performance. She has the perfect look for a mid-90s, unsexualized, middle-aged office worker and her appearance perfectly encapsulates the word "goofy" for me. She's clumsy and physical without being an inane comic figure and she's snarky and sarcastic without coming off as an insufferable bitch. She's given all the best lines and the best arc, and sometimes she threatens to overshadow Schwarzenegger's domineering screen presence and Tom Arnold's fuckmouth.

And Schwarzenegger himself obviously handles the action in the same way he always does: like he's ordering a sandwich. It rarely works in more serious movies (and your enjoyment of a classic like Commando specifically depends on the sort of mileage you get out of standing behind Schwarzenegger at a Jimmy John's) unless he happens to be playing an emotionless robot. Thanks to Cameron, though, Schwarzenegger pulls off what is easily the best performance of his career where he isn't powered by hamster wheels. He plays a James Bond figure but with that trademark Austrian awkwardness. Look, if Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't a huge star and was a cook at IHOP or something, he would still sort of catch the eye. He's not exactly inconspicuous and if you needed to quickly hide him it would be hard to find a broom cupboard that he would fit in. He would make a shitty spy, and the movie knows that. He could never pass as a regular family man or a computer salesman - he looks totally out of place at a dinner table. And the movie knows that. I suspect Schwarzenegger doesn't, though, and the entire juxtaposition becomes very funny.

The action is pretty standard 90s fare, making it a bit disappointing that Cameron was behind the camera. There are a few scenes that stand out, usually when the film gives itself over to physical gags that work surprisingly well.

Can I talk about Tom Arnold again for a minute? Of course I can. I don't see any other bloggers around. Imagine if James Bond had a sidekick named Reginald Bagley, whose gut hung out over his pants and none of his teeth faced the same direction. And imagine that he seemed to love that Bond made him look like a blubbering fuck-up by going into space, banging a dozen moonladies and stopping a world-threatening crisis without ever setting down his martini while Reginald sat on his ass and gave him helpful hints from inside an oversized bag of Cheetos. And Reginald has no impact on the plot. And imagine that this character isn't meant to appear totally pathetic and worthless next to Bond, and you'll get a good idea of the character Tom Arnold plays BEFORE Tom Arnold the war criminal even becomes a factor. It's a personal issue that kept me from enjoying large parts of an otherwise highly enjoyable film.

And that's pretty much all there is to say about True Lies. It's fun, well-made, features some great performances and just doesn't hold up to the crazy ambition of Cameron's last four films. I can't help but feel like he's floundering here, even if it's just momentary. It will only take three years for him to release the most expensive movie ever made up to that point, a film of such crazy ambition and such unbelievable success that it begs me to watch it again for the first time since it was released (when I was seven).

8/10

Clash of the Titans

Terminator 2: Judgment Day gets a lot of hyperbole thrown at it and, strangely, most of it is deserved and as a cinephile whose main love in the cinema is action pictures, it's a particularly important set of hyperbole to address. No, it's not the best sequel of all time. That one boggles my mind because I can immediately say "Godfather 2" and everyone in the room will shut up. No, I don't think it's the best action film of all time. That title goes to Raiders of the Lost Ark. It's probably the last great action film to come out of the boom of mostly awful, sometimes brilliant action films in the 80s. No, it's not even James Cameron's best film (I think it's pretty clear that I'm all gooey-eyed over The Terminator). It is, by far, the most important stepping stone between practically filmed movies and the CGI-heavy acid trips we've been getting at the theaters this last decade or so. While it's not the last, or even really close to the last blockbuster filmed mostly with practical effects, it's probably the last Great one and it signifies the point where CGI became a huge selling point, so now people can say "TRANSFORMS II: REVENGE OF HTE FALLEN - 10/10 AWESOME GRAPHICS" and their worth can be determined as more than "would fetch twenty American dollars on Russian skin trade".

Why, you ask? Because this is the first time CGI was used throughout a film in an entirely effective and useful way. After this came out, studios and filmmakers began to realize the possibilities CGI presented, specifically a guy named Steven Spielberg who used them to create some pretty astounding creatures for a mostly overlooked dinosaur project called The Jurassic Themepark. That, too, is a very important stepping stone for the technology, but I can see none of you have seen it and are getting cross-eyed with anger at talk of this confusing dinofilm where I should be talking about Terminator 2.

A decade or so after The Terminator, Kyle Reese remains quite steadfast in his decision to remain dead, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) is in a mental institution and their son, living paradox John Connor (Edward Furlong), is a willful fuck-up of a kid. Somehow, though, this little punk is going to grow up to lead the fight against the machines. Those machines send a second Terminator (Robert Patrick) back in time to kill Connor, this one made of liquid metal and capable of blending seamlessly into its surroundings. The human resistance sends back the T-800 (or T-101 depending on what nerd you're listening to), a model identical to or very similar to (and again played by Arnold Schwarzenegger), the model seen as the antagonist in the first film to protect John.

There's a story I've heard that Cameron's original idea for the T-1000 was to have Michael Biehn play it to more effectively infiltrate the Connors. While you and I both know that in James Cameron's hands that would have turned out a bit trite and sappy, it doesn't change that it's a fucking incredible idea, even if the deliriously strange edges would have inevitably been shaved off. I can still fantasize about the possibilities and lament its loss as being confusing and uncommercial. It's all the more strange that this idea is so appealing to me because I love Robert Patrick as the T-1000 so very much. Essentially building off of Schwarzenegger's performance in the original, the T-1000 is equally emotionless, but not being a huge cyborg and instead being a malleable liquid metal, his movements are all exaggerated just a teensy bit. It's a marvelous little pantomime. He never fails to look menacing, but most of the time he reminds me of various animals. Sometimes his head darts around like a hawk, and in the early mall scenes he always reminds me of a cat, confidently slinking through crowds and observing his prey before launching at it with speed and strength he did not seem capable of just a moment ago.

Schwarzenegger, with his character expanded, is actually a lot less interesting. The whole "machine learns to love" angle is so played out these days it's easy to forget that Schwarzenegger sort of originated it. Still, conveying love and affection through a non-emotional filter just ends up being less interesting than his emotionless psycho bit. It was the mystery of the character that made him so exciting and compelling and with that role delegated to the T-1000, Schwarzenegger seems so bland in comparison.

Hamilton, on the other hand, is superb. Every time I watch these two movies together, it's the jaw-dropping physical transformation of Hamilton that really shocks me. If I had to guess, I'd say every meal for the seven intervening years was three packs of cigarettes and a cereal bowl filled with anabolic steroids. She's become a violent animal in the years since the events of the first film, her eyes sunken by the trauma and her will hardened by the years of preparation. She's almost nothing like her character in the first film, except for those moments where you recognize her for a moment and lament the loss of that nubile young waitress. After this viewing, I'm tempted to call her performance the equal to Sigourney Weaver in Aliens.

Edward Furlong is some kind of a train wreck half the time. His voice is so clearly looped a lot of the time that he's just fucking distracting. Not to mention he plays an unappealing little bastard who makes me never want to have children, and if there's any great crime that Terminator 2 commits, it's the launch of Edward Furlong's career, a career that ends up giving us yet another shitty aspect of that well-loved shitsack, American History X. A lot of the time, though, he's sort of inoffensive.

But the real star of this film is James Cameron. This is the sort of tremendous undertaking that I can imagine driving a director to the brink of sanity. Between his huge star, his enormous budget, the amount of practical effects and set-ups necessary every day and the grueling nine month shoot, I'm shocked that he didn't throw in the towel as soon as this film was finished. These days, most of these sorts of films are delegated to effects teams and are probably easier to shoot than anything else, seeing as they're mostly done in temperature-controlled studios and the only thing you have to worry about is the bright colors of the green screen hurting your eyes. I imagine that they hired fucking green berets to fetch the coffee on this set and most of them were killed by explosions or Robert Patrick trying to get into character.

And praise be to James Cameron for realizing that to retread the success of the first film would be a waste, and instead making it one of the most gigantic action pictures of all time, centered around the battle between the T-800 and the T-1000.

That's one of the major reasons that this film works so brilliantly. When a film this epic in scope and so busy with characters and sub-plots, boiling it down to a heroic hero versus a villainous villain is the most effective way to structure a film like this and to never lose the narrative. I could list a million examples, but the two that come to mind as the best recent examples are No Country for Old Men and, obviously, The Dark Knight. A sympathetic hero and a villain so incredibly evil are those films' greatest, most elemental assets.

I will say this against the film: compared to the first one, it's a much shallower, far more rote affair. But damn it, the first film is one of the best films of the 80s. I hate to compare the two; the sequel is just so different. It's such a great, great action movie that I'll forgive it a lot of things, like a middle section that drags a little bit (the first time anything like this has happened in a Cameron film) and the weird, jarring introduction of narration for a few scenes in the middle.

It's really an extraordinary piece of filmmaking, if the size of a production is taken into account even a little bit. Every few minutes brings yet another set piece, any one of which a large scale production would be jealous of. It really raised the bar in a lot of ways, especially for the size and pace of a film. Every second of Terminator 2 outdoes the climax of similar films, almost making it all climax all the time. But yet more praise deserves to be thrown Cameron's way for making the real climax stand out and keep us on the edge of our seats.

It's probably Cameron's best film, in terms of objective quality. You can't really dislike Terminator 2 for any real reason, it's just too much fun. While the first Terminator is geared more towards my tastes and feels a lot more like an artistic accomplishment, its sequel is really an auteur's piece as much as anything else, which is always exciting to see in a blockbuster. I feel reduced to a little kid when I watch it, and I'm happy to join the ranks of that geek culture who hold this as the preeminent geek film, outside of Star Wars.

10/10

Gazing Back

So here we arrive at where James Cameron gives away his sentimentality and the fuzzy teddy bear hiding beneath his human skin. I mentioned in both my Terminator review and my Aliens review that those movies were the grim torments of the movie gods, but in the most deliriously invigorating way possible, like being hit in the face with a Monet. You may be bruised and bleeding by the end of either of those films, but you'll be ready for round two. None of the films we'll be watching in the next week will be anything like those in terms of tone. They'll all be airier and poppier and while of course I do not prefer one style over the other, I do think that James Cameron, at least initially, had a better grasp of the dark and grim. I like feeling like I'm trapped in brightly colored bubble gum as much as the next guy, but I'm sad that Cameron was never able to exercise the same amount of control over tone and deliver a film that leaves me feeling something distinctive, whether it be the rape-victim shakes or polka-dotted fervor (although crazy housewives the world over will argue with me on Titanic).

Like all of Cameron's films, I've seen The Abyss before, but for this viewing I opted for the Director's Cut, seeing as this retrospective is a celebration of James Cameron as a director and based on some kind words my brother had for this version.

The Abyss takes place in an underwater oil drilling rig that looks like it could be a summer getaway for Victor Von Doom. There, blue-collar worker Virgil (Ed Harris) and his estranged wife Lindsey (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) are asked to aid a group of navy seals in finding a missing nuclear submarine. Before long they encounter strange, brightly colored creatures zipping around adorably and casually causing adorable mass pandemonium. Evil military man Coffey (Michael Biehn) wants to nuke them, but the compassionate protagonists want to try and make contact with the strange creatures. Paranoia ensues for the viewer does not know: are the creatures benevolent, or are they as devious as they seem?

If you're thinking to yourself "man, that sounds an awful lot like Close Encounters of the Third Kind", then grab a Medal of Honor from the basket. I know that the originality of a story is almost trivial, but damn it, it's like making a movie about the life of a magazine mogul and his disk sled told through flashback and called Citizen Blaine or something. Spielberg kind of staked out this territory in '77 and made a movie that anyone would be hard-pressed to top. I can't decide if James Cameron's decision to put a paper cut-out of Ed Harris in front of Richard Dreyfuss and repackage it as a different film makes him very ballsy or just stupid, but The Abyss has at least one huge thing on its side: it is maddeningly suspenseful.

Really, as much as I bitch about them being exactly the same movie, the similarities are nominal. Close Encounters had a smaller thematic scope (and was more successful for it), while The Abyss is a bit more genre-oriented. And would you look at that! Genre-oriented. Just the sort of thing I like. The Abyss is largely a locked-door thriller with underwater aliens serving more as a macguffin than an integral part of the narrative. Their presence only serves to aggravate the incredibly tense conflict between the rig workers and the military dudes.

And that conflict, so often played out, is given new vitality by Cameron and I have NO idea how. For a 19-year-old I think I'm a pretty observant moviegoer, but I remain absolutely perplexed by this unusually potent thriller for the second time through. Both times I've been driven to the brink of insanity by this film's tense conflicts and both times I've emerged from the other side without my usual look of smug triumph.

Perhaps it's the underwater setting and the very real, very prevalent fear of drowning that, strangely, few films ever exploit. Drowning is #2 on my list of fears, a list that features two items: 1) Dragons and 2) Drowning. But I don't think that one thing can account for the outrageous effectiveness of this film, and it's time to give the other players their due. Despite being nearly three hours, The Abyss is as immaculately paced as any of Cameron's films, using its extra running time for great effect, even managing to keep my pulse up through its roughly 40-minute denouement. The actors, in particular Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, create very sympathetic and real characters, full of life and passion with a clear, but largely unspoken, love and mutual admiration. If James Cameron has never fully received credit for his ability to pull the very best out of his actors, it hasn't been for lack of my chamioning. I wouldn't say it's the best role of Ed Harris' career, for there are so, so many great performances in his career, but it's the best thing I've ever seen Mastrantonio do, by far, even if her filmography is significantly more limited.

And would you believe me if I told you that James Cameron finally found a use for Michael Biehn? Yes, as the jittery, violent and totally illogical SEAL commander sitting around and whittling on his forearm, Michael Biehn has finally found a role that matches his facial features. It's as natural as anything I could fathom Biehn doing; he would probably have a similar reaction if the waiter told him they didn't serve Pepsi products.

Although Coffey's character doesn't make much sense to me. He seems to have the deep sea cabin fever they talk about even before he arrives on the platform, most likely because he's played by Michael "I sleep in an electric chair" Biehn, and his evil plan is to nuke the creatures because "there's no way of warning the surface"? There are so many undocumented plants and animals on Earth not because they're hiding in the bushes or under rocks, but because scientists can't keep up with all of them. If we wanted to document all the creatures in the Amazon rain forest, we'd have to level the trees and wipe them all out all the plants and animals to have enough paper, and then James Cameron would have to make a movie about it, the prick. We have plenty of moral conundrum surrounding the discovery of new creatures without Lt. Tweak trying to nuke anything that can't be found in a K-Mart.

So yeah, Biehn is far more cartoonish and less humanistic than Harris and Mastrantonio, but I can't really pass judgment on his place in the film because the effectiveness of the movie is something that I don't understand AT ALL.

The film's claim to fame is its special effects, specifically the famous water tendril scene, one of the first examples of CGI integrated with live action. One of Cameron's greatest assets as a human being, and the chief reason that I remain wildly, unapologetically excited for Avatar is his ability to always use special effects technology effectively and never overreach the limits of that technology. For 20-year-old CGI it holds up astonishingly well, as do the alien fish monsters and their horrible neon metropolis. It's exactly the sort of thing that you would think of if I said "cutting edge in the late 80s", right after you imagined parachute pants.

I never liked the ending in the theatrical cut. It's one of those movies that makes the viewers feel like they aren't violent, selfish libertines with a stack of bodies that would make John Wayne Gacy look like a ballerina. It reminds me of that little kid who sits on the curb and asks you to sign a petition to end world hunger. I know I love world hunger, but I also know that the poor little guy's heart is in the right place. He doesn't seem to understand why world hunger exists. That was always a footnote in the original film, but dear GOD is it prevalent in the director's cut. We have roughly eight hours of heavy handed message delivery before the merciful end. After watching this movie I ate an entire shipment of Peace Corps brand potato chips out of spite.

So, to recap, we have an exceedingly well-constructed film with great performances and great effects marred by a simplistic message. LET'S GET USED TO IT. There's a lot of that coming up and we'd be wise to brace for impact.

9/10

Sonic-Electronic Ball-Breaker or: Femnism in Action

1986 saw James Cameron directing a sequel to what is inarguabley one of the best films ever made: Alien. With its absolutely impeccable mise-en-scene used in every single shot to evoke claustrophobia or dread, its production design full of the Everest of nightmare imagery and a director of commercial fare who, like so many directors before him, made his greatest film his first.

James Cameron's sequel Aliens is widely regarded as one of the greatest sequels of all time, and that's a perfectly fair assessment. While some morons believe Aliens outmatches Alien, I can't even imagine a film as great as Alien having a sequel that lands anywhere near its predecessor. The fact that it actually ends up being a great movie is cause for celebration. It's not the unmitigated masterpiece that Alien is, but it's brilliant in its own right.

For those of you who don't know (and for those of you who don't, get the fuck off my blog), Alien ended with Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) unsympathetically blowing Michael Seymour and H.R. Giger's masterpiece out an airlock and snorting a line of phenobarbitals in celebration before falling asleep for sixty years. That's where Aliens picks up. Ripley is awoken and is immediately handed a pickax despite possibly being the oldest woman on the planet. Before long, a swanky, charming corporate type who only cares about the dollars and cents shows up to convince Ripley to go back to the planet where she first encountered the alien lifeform. It seems that the big corporation has lost contact with the settlers they impulsively let live on a planet overrun with murderous aliens. It's up to Ripley and an ill-equipped, under-manned squad (that means eight soldiers) of space folly to go in and clean up the aliens that seemed to effortlessly wipe out several hundred people.

There Ripley encounters the sole survivor of the alien onslaught, a little girl named Newt for some reason. Ripley robs the cradle and runs off with her shiny new daughter to replace the one whose life she slept through.

So we're off to fight the aliens, and what a fight it is! Essentially highjacking all the brilliant design work of the first film and throwing it into a brilliant action film. Aside from the designs, a general narrative continuation and Ripley, the films aren't that similar. Ripley, like all the characters in the last film, was barely more fleshed out than she had to be. Like most slashers, she exists to be killed by the glorious beast at the center of the film. Cameron gets a lot of mileage out of fleshing out her character and really bringing Sigourney Weaver to the film's fore in a performance that's as great as everything you've ever heard.

And here's where James Cameron's noted femnism works the best. Now, I don't think of myself as a sexist, but I DO think that there are irreconcilable differences between men and women that don't begin and end with penis/vagina. For instance, men are inherently stronger than women. Don't believe me? Arm wrestle a woman. Or, if you're a woman, arm wrestle a man. The man will almost always win. That's not to say that a woman can't win, in fact I've had a woman crush my arm into a bloody powder. I dated a girl that could kick my ass, but that's the exception that prove the rule.

Anyway, I was going somewhere with that. Ripley could easily be the best female action hero ever. Most of the time a female action hero is a woman with a ballsack. She suddenly punches out burly Russian lumberjacks three times their size without breaking a nail, puts on a barrelfull of muscle and becomes the picture of emotionless head-smashing (see: Sarah Conner in Terminator 2). She fails to retain any uniquely feminine characteristics (I consider violence and hot tempers masculine characteristics, although again they're not exclusively masculine characteristics; I just find men more inclined to those traits, generally speaking) and fails to be anything more than a generic action hero. With a vagina. Ripley is strong, intelligent and uniquely feminine, making her the perfect model for female action heroes. In any case, there's usually a REASON we're putting a female lead in a film primarily targeted at adolescent males, right? Why not make it something that defines her character as a strong FEMALE? Her maternal instincts guide her actions, but not in a shitty Hallmark Channel sort of way, in a "grenade launchers and flamethrowers" sort of way.

So if a lot of the thrills of the first film came from the mystery of discovering what the alien was, Aliens derives most of its thrills from seeing the aliens organize and put those traits we discovered in the first film into action in their own environment rather than the "alien" environment of the Nostromo.

As far as Cameron's direction, which, if I'm remembering correctly, is the entire reason I'm watching this movie, it's another action masterpiece. This film has more in common with The Terminator than any of his subsequent films in that afterward you feel like you've been dragged through a field of thorns, mud and cancer. Helping play into that is a billion false endings that never feel gratuitous or cheap because we're invested in the story and characters. Also the razor-sharp editing does a lot to keep the film moving, never lingering on the various plot points and always moving towards the action or the impending sense of doom. It's one film that uses every second of its two and a half hour running time to great effect, despite my frustration at this recent trend of action films outliving your children.

But the best thing he does as a director in this film is that he takes the alien muppets (and make no mistake, they are fucking muppets) and making them absolutely convincing just with his editing and camera work. It's one of the most repeated stories in filmmaking legend that the shark in Jaws became the quintessential unseen menace because Spielberg couldn't get the goddamn animatornic shark to work. This sort of filmmaking is a casualty of the rise of CGI and if there's anything to blame for the fall of horror, it's that. Cameron's lumbering alien muppets were clearly not suited to be convincing antagonists until he teamed up with his virtuoso crew. It's the sort of thing only a truly great director can pull off, and I think James Cameron happens to be a goddamn brilliant director.

It's no Terminator, but it's one hell of a film.

10/10

One Man Army

When I started this retrospective I mentioned that there was one film in Cameron's filmography that I held near and dear to my heart. I suppose before we go any further, I should mention that it's The Terminator that I was referring to. I've often held it aloft as a shiny example of what a chase thriller looks like, how it should be done, how it should be cut, scored, shot, staged and helmed. You'll excuse me, then, if every now and then my rhetoric dissolves into a series of gentle but enthusiastic kisses for a film that I value more than the lives of anyone who will ever read this.

I'm sure you all know the plot, but what kind of critic would I be without recounting it? It's the future and despite the fact that we somehow invented and mass-produced energy weapons, it kind of looks like a shitty place to raise your kids. Robots have taken over the world, and not the cuddly R.O.B.-style robots, the Fear Cereal-chewing, red-eyed Battlebot sort of robots. Around 1997 when I was just starting my Final Fantasy phase and you were all enjoying James Cameron's Titanic, super-advanced AI Skynet missed its appointment to take over the world and enslave humanity as prophesised in 1984 by this film. Skynet, with no regard for the prime directive, shoots a naked Austrian robot-man (Arnold Schwarzenegger as the eponymous villain) back in time to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) future mother of John Connor, leader of the human resistance. The human resistance send back a single warrior, Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) to protect her.

Unfortunately for Sarah Connor, Kyle's a bit of a downer. Not only will we not be flying around the galaxy sending space-hippies to their death in fifty years, but he keeps going on about the futility of fighting the Terminator. With the weapons available in 1984, the Terminator is virtually indestructible.

And here's where the film starts getting intriguing. Out of the gate we're introduced to a villain that is unstoppable. He is cold and emotionless and, unlike so many other films that aped its style, The Terminator succeeds in giving the machine absolutely no human qualities. People often wonder about a one ton body builder being cast as a robot that's meant to infiltrate human society, but it lends several degrees of cold, mechanical evil to his character. If he was prancing around just like a normal human, acting precisely like humans do and adopting personality traits and character flaws and all the other things we like to see in our characters he would lose the thing that makes machines scary. Never once in this film do we look at the Terminator and mistake him for human.

Cameron masterfully wrangles Arnold Schwarzenegger's inexperience as an actor and his awkward Austrian screen presence to create a character that is a merciless killer, LOOKS like a merciless killer and has an intangible awkwardness about him as if he was created by machines that have only observed humans from a distance but were quick to dismiss them as dangerous variables.

I have fewer nice things to say about Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn. Hamilton is a bit bland (although she is written as an every-woman) but I don't think her performance spends any time detracting from the overall impact of the film. Michael Biehn has never been an actor I've liked much. He looks like he was told his father was eaten by wildebeests and never got over being told he lives in a hipster sitcom. I suppose it works well enough when he's playing a soldier who is constantly on edge and was learning to make plastique while we were dancing in demonic little circles to songs about the Black Plague. Furthermore, they have little romantic chemistry. That would be a real complaint if the romance was any more than a simple plot point, but the later scenes could have used the emotional impact a successful romance would have wrought.

If you've noticed, all the things I just listed were "it could have been this, but it remains functional and effective where it is", my point being that despite the criticisms I leveled against it, I'm just pointing out the things it doesn't excel at. Don't let that make you think it doesn't excel like crazy all over the place. First of all, the middle section of the film is as flawless as anything ever put on film. While the climax doesn't hold up to the absolute perfection of the TechNoir shootout and subsequent chase, that's a standard I wouldn't ever hold a film to.

And the early, largely silent scenes with the Terminator are incredibly tense, proving once again how overrated film scores are and how much more effective a film can be when its intentions aren't muddled by manipulative music.

The way James Cameron manipulates the gritty underbelly of LA as a stage for action calls to mind the greatest of classic noirs and is his single greatest accomplishment as a filmmaker as far as I'm concerned. The only way I can think to describe it is to call to mind Taxi Driver. The city itself is almost never directly referenced, but it becomes an indispensable part of the narrative and the visual vocabulary. A series of twisting alleyways strewn with litter and filled with homeless people and greasy dumpsters give way to streets lined with uncaring souls. It's a place where optimism dies. It's almost as apocalyptic as the world Reese grew up in. But every time we think this city can't become more dark and twisted, Cameron jerks us back to Reese's time, where rats are a delicacy and death is almost a relief.

The standoff between the very human, very fragile Kyle Reese and the indestructible, unstoppable Terminator has elemental qualities that make it a timeless formula. Rarely is the contrast between the hero and the villain so harsh, and rarely is an air of hopelessness so effective.

Yeah, it's a fucking bleak film. It's just as bleak as you've heard and probably more bleak than you remember. The whole experience is a bit like being dragged through gravel. It's the sort of thing you walk away from dazed but ready to experience again, hoping that this time the thick atmosphere of oppression will dissolve to allow you to read the story and characters more, but it never does.

The only film I've ever seen that has truly bettered its oft-violated style and formula is No Country for Old Men. That's a goddamn bold statement, but they're two films that I hold in exceptionally high regard, and while James Cameron is one of the most consistent blockbuster filmmakers of all time, he shares one thing with so many great directors of blockbusters. Like Spielberg and like Lucas, his first film will always be his best. If we're not counting that fucking Piranha movie.

11/10

The Finest Flying Piranha Movie Ever Made

I've never seen the original Piranha, I'm not an authority on horror and James Cameron has renounced this film and repeatedly said he considers his first film The Terminator. Why did I choose to watch it? Because it has motherfucking flying piranhas in it.

When I heard that, my imagination started running around like a little kid, conjuring images that didn't even really have anything to do with flying piranhas.

My hopes for this film were through the roof. It almost got the point where the film had no chance to live up to my expectations. I imagined a huge ensemble of characters being introduced in the first scene, only to be eaten by GODDAMN FLYING PIRANHAS in the second scene.

They sort of do that, too. They introduce a huge host of characters and never go anywhere with them. Some of them die, some of them observe the climax from a distance and shrug, and some of them are last seen in the middle of the movie as if someone just forgot about them. I prefer my idea, though. As usual.

We're introduced to some lame characters who spend a lot of time not skipping rope and playing football with their new flying piranha neighbors. One of them is the android from Aliens and one of them is his son who gets his very own useless subplot.

Then the piranhas start eating houses and cars in a single bite and shooting rainbows from their eyes that make people explode into a bloody mist. Then one of them fuses with some busty, foreign chick so that her boobs can be fused to the piranha's gigantic exoskeleton. And then the piranhas start forming together to create a giant piranha and the US government calls in the Justice League to stop them but the Justice League can't stop them because Superman can fly, but is he a fucking piranha? The film ends when Lance Henriksen is crowned king of piranhas for no reason and they play a benefit concert with Aerosmith and then the piranhas fuse with the entire crowd and become bigger than the Earth.

Or at least I'll give James Cameron credit for maybe thinking that would be an awesome movie. Unfortunately, the stories I've heard have said that James Cameron wasn't terribly involved in production. In fact, I've heard a fellow named Ovidio G. Assonitis did most of the directing. It seems that Cameron (at most) filmed it, but was not involved in pre-production or editing and I can imagine the flying piranha charity drive was the first thing to go.

Sometimes I wonder if I get so bored during bad movies that I substitute entire plots in my head and come up with better movies to watch in my brain, sometimes pretending that what's on screen is part of my glorious brain movie. And that's exactly what happened during Piranha II: The Spawning. I was so busy pretending the piranhas were playing chess that I barely absorbed anything in this movie. And maybe it's because it was a shit movie, but I can imagine it was because I knew the piranhas could fly ahead of time and was heartbroken when all they did was nibble on your mother's Christmas ham.

The only thing that kept jarring me was the musical cues that announced the arrival of the piranhas every time they were on screen. In the future, when everything is digital. When our bicycles are digital. When our playing cards are digital. When our children are digital. And when those digital children clip those digital cards to their digital bikes and they make digital motorcycle noises to make the kids digitally cool. That is what that noise sounded like.

Other than that, the plot was stupid, the formula was stupid, it looks like it was shot in two weeks, the actors are atrocious and I don't want to think about it any more.

stupid/10