Big Budget Gods - James Cameron

There are two ways to measure success: Amount and quality. If you can make a living doing what you love, you're a success. If everything you make is fucking awesome, you're also a success. Everything James Cameron makes is fucking awesome. Imdb.com lists only 17 directorial projects under Cameron's name. Pretty much everyone's first couple forays into film are unknowns, so we can throw out Xenogenesis and Piranha Part 2. We're left with 15 movies/shows/documentaries. Of those 15 projects 6 of them are pure blockbusters of monumental status. Considering that in recent years Cameron has turned his eye to documentaries and left narrative fiction behind him, that's a considerable success rate. Here is why James Cameron is a big budget god:

The Terminator (1984)
Aliens (1986)
The Abyss (1989)
Terminator 2 : Judgment Day (1991)
True Lies (1994)
Titanic (1997)

If I had to I could watch only James Cameron movies for the rest of my life and be very entertained. I can't even tell you how many times I've seen the movies on that list...except Titanic, which I only saw once. Titanic became burdened by teenage-girl-weepiness, so it was hard for me to want to see it. The movie definitely deserves another chance because it is a giant spectacle of great film making and special effects. Here's a great article on Titanic and everything done right in the film: Better late Than Never: Titanic

As far as perfect movies go, it doesn't get much better than Terminator 2. T2 is an all time favorite sci-fi movie of mine, followed closely by Aliens. Some might classify T2 as an action movie, but the science fiction aspects of it are really what make the movie work. Apart from Spider-Man 2, T2 might be the best sequel ever made. Terminator 2 has everything: great one-liners, jaw-dropping special effects that still hold up, retina-fusing action sequences and a touching relationship between John Connor and the T-800 (Arnold). The movie has great balance and was a benchmark for visual effects at the time. Cameron's movies have always been on the forefront of technological advancements. Plus what a lot of people don't remember is that Arnold was the bad guy in The Terminator. In T2 he's good, but no one on screen or in the audience knows that at the start.

Aliens is another sequel that's better than the original, although it's difficult to make that statement because Alien and Aliens are such different movies. Everything from the tone and atmosphere to the characters and plot vary so widely that it's hard to compare them. Yet even with their differences, the movies make sense in terms of the development of a continuing story-line. It's one thing for a sequel to just have more of something, (ie: more aliens = bigger, better movie), but it's another to extend the mythology and give the audience more information about the mysterious titular creatures. In Alien, the alien itself is a character. For most of the movie there is a crew of only 6 people on this massive freighter of a space ship. Add one alien to the mix and you're adding a whole character that everyone in the crew is aware of. That's changing the dynamic quite a bit. In Aliens the hive of aliens were essentially one character. They behave with a hive mentality and that gives the audience a way to identify with them. Everyone knows what a colony of army ants is like when they're out on a mission, or how a swarm of bees reacts to the presence of an threat. It's the same with the aliens. They are interstellar insects, cosmic cockroaches. Cameron brought that idea to the table and it changed the tone of the film.

The Abyss was another innovative movie. Its effects predate T2, but there is an obvious progression from The Abyss to T2. The Abyss not only shows Cameron's propensity for creating great fantasy worlds, but his huge scope as well. All of Cameron's movies are big. Big sets, big guns, big vehicles. Even though it's set in a cramped underwater research facility, The Abyss doesn't feel like a claustrophobic story. James Cameron always seems to me to be interested in blue collar stuff. He throws out shiny sports cars and has chases in semi trucks; he ditches X-Files/CSI settings to show us a group of (possibly) high school-educated blue collar Joe's and their interactions on said research station. And the research station isn't a glossy hi-tech affair either, it's dark and grungy and bulky. When I was a kid I liked the fast, sleek cars. My friend liked big trucks and construction vehicles. Most film makers want to have shiny expensive stuff in their films, but it's Cameron's insistence of using big bulky apparatuses that keeps my interest in his work afloat.

I can't talk about James Cameron without mentioning True Lies, or as I like to call it, Arnold's last great movie. Arnold has nearly reached muse-status for Cameron, and True Lies was a role made just for Schwarzenegger. After being a robot for two movies, James Cameron finally let Arnold be a human, and the movie is action-packed and hilarious at the same time. I would never have thought to team up Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom Arnold, but they gel perfectly. Plus True Lies gets bonus points for making Tia Carrere even sexier than she was Wayne's World, and for introducing the Harrier jet to the public eye.

The sequence where Arnold flies the Harrier is one of my all-time favorites in action movie history. And it cost about $1,700 per frame. There are 24 frames in a second. Factored into this cost are elements like editing, CGI, actor's wages, rental of the Harrier jets from the US gov't, sound stage rental, etc. The United States gov't rented the Harrier jets to Cameron's production at a rate of $2,410 per hour. That's before fuel and everything else. True Lies ended up costing about $146 million.

In recent years James Cameron expanded on Titanic by doing a lot of underwater documentaries about wrecked ships and deep sea life with Expedition: Bismark, Ghosts of the Abyss and Aliens of the Deep. He began using 3-D while filming Ghosts of the Abyss which is a film about exploring the remains of the Titanic. Cameron is continuing to lead the way for 3-D film technology with his newest feature, Avatar, which will be out sometime in 2009.

Cameron makes movies about what he wants when he wants. He always has lavish budgets, but the money is all up there on the screen. He never holds anything back and you always have a good time. He is an infectious geek who knows how to get everyone interested in the things he likes. Everything he does is worth seeing.