The Overlooked Humanity of James Cameron
Why a filmmaker renowned for delivering spectacle deserves a closer look
I had the good fortune to catch a 70mm screening of Aliens the other week at a local cinema, which under the dearth of new releases, appears to have employed the strategy of screening beloved classics to try and fill the revenue gap. In modern times, at least pre-COVID19, the desire to see new movies at the earliest possible opportunity is, I would hazard to venture, far and away the biggest impetus for most viewers to flock to brick-and-mortar cinemas. It’s a decision driven more by necessity than real desire, an engagement resulting from distribution schedule mandates rather than a compelling value proposition.
To speculate about the long-term implications of the direct-to-streaming release strategies employed by the major studios in the midst of the pandemic (long the de facto method employed by Amazon and Netflix, which has successfully carved itself a place at the table of respectability in recent years) on the commercial validity of traditional release models would necessitate an entire piece in itself, as well as additional research I’ve yet to conduct. But I know this: there are few stronger cases to be made for the vitality of the cinema as a cultural institution than experiencing Aliens, a film its director James Cameron once described as “40 miles of bad road”, on the big screen.
Part One: An Express Elevator to Hell
Aliens was actually the second trip I’d made to the cinema after six months away; the first was a screening of Tenet plagued with audio issues that left me and my party disappointed and filled with the desire to wait for the home video release so we could rewatch it with subtitles. These issues appeared to be endemic to the film itself and reflect a conscious aesthetic choice on the part of Christopher Nolan and his sound team, a choice whose logic buckles underneath the film’s copious reliance on exposition to both explain the unique sci-fi mechanics it puts forward and tie its various plot beats together.
It isn’t a problem you’d ever expect to encounter with a James Cameron film. Even beyond the sound mix (which for Aliens won an Oscar), Cameron’s entire approach to filmmaking seems to revolve around directness and clarity. There’s the masterful way he frames, blocks, and edits his action scenes, which establish and rely upon a concrete sense of geography, centered always on the actions of his key players, and the consequences of or reactions to those actions. You’re never lost trying to follow movement in his movies, even going all the way back to The Terminator, for all intents and purposes his proper directorial debut (Cameron’s involvement and all the behind-the-scenes drama are the most interesting thing about his actual debut, Piranha II: The Spawning, so I’ve never seen it).
To put things into perspective, it took Nolan, who, despite the issues I’ve raised with the decisions made for Tenet, is also one of our greatest filmmakers working today, until roughly the last third of his career to date to figure this out. Almost completely illegible fight sequences block Batman Begins from unmitigated greatness, and even with the massive improvements he’d made, both The Dark Knight and Inception, otherwise the peak of his narrative powers, are slightly blemished with one muddled set piece each (the Batmobile-truck-security van chase in the tunnels and the snowmobile hijacking, respectively).
Cameron action scenes, while not often featuring the flashy long takes or elaborate fight choreography favored by the Wachowskis (The Matrix) or Chad Stahelski (John Wick), are nevertheless always coherent, and more importantly, gripping. In the climactic battle between the alien queen and Ripley in a power loader, we’re constantly aware of the balance of power as each party employs various tactics and each tool in their respective arsenals in an effort to gain the advantage. A couple of crushing blows care of the loader’s raw strength. The Queen’s tail holds Ripley in place. Vice grip returns in kind. Up close and personal with the second mouth. Blowtorch. All while James Horner’s propulsive score accentuates every move.
I’d wager it’s this facility for in-the-moment thrills that led to Avatar’s incredible success during its theatrical run. It’s far from his best film, and its thin, forgettable characters have prevented it from clinging onto the public consciousness in the years since, but it’s telling that few spoke ill of Avatar when it was working its magic. Cameron’s movies hit differently in cinemas because he removes every possible barrier between the audience and total immersion.
Perhaps less lauded but even more crucial to achieving this effect is the careful precision with which Cameron constructs the structure and flow of his narratives. Where Nolan, whose grasp of structure is also his greatest strength as a filmmaker, generally builds his movies like puzzles to be solved, cloaked in mystery and full of twists, to maximize viewer engagement, Cameron values efficiency above all. Despite many of his films being high-concept sci-fi pieces, he sets up the core premise of his settings quickly and economically within the opening scenes, letting the immediate, in-the-moment story beats carry the momentum from scene to scene. Any additional explanation of mechanics is folded organically into scenes with broader narrative purpose, even for such an albatross as time travel, the nuances of which Avengers: Endgame devoted several scenes’ worth of exposition to detailing. (I’ve seen this nonchalant approach to time travel in only one other story: the Androids saga of Dragon Ball, itself heavily influenced by Cameron’s two Terminator movies both in the set-up of its plot and in the design and wardrobes of its characters. As it happens, I’ve never seen a cleaner, more intuitive approach to its mechanics.)
It’s the reason Aliens feels like such a roller coaster, especially in the original theatrical cut that I saw for the first time in over a decade thanks to the 70mm screening (it might now be my preferred cut for that reason, despite the richer characterization in the Special Edition). It picks Ripley up from where we last left her, summarizes her backstory, establishes the driving force behind the plot, introduces us to our expanded cast of characters and briefly gives us an idea of who they are, then as soon as we land on LV-426, the tension spikes and doesn’t let up until the very end.
I caught it with a buddy who had never seen any of the Alien films, and Cameron’s place-setting was so seamless that he didn’t even realize it was a sequel until he’d gotten home and looked it up. I felt slightly guilty about not being clearer about that in my initial pitch, but then I remembered how, like a good portion of its initial audience, I had never seen the original when I was first introduced to Terminator 2, but completely bought into it anyway— hook, line, and sinker. (This was partially due to T2’s initial audience comprising a sizable percentage of the global population at the time, whereas the original was more akin to a cult hit. In my particular case though, as, I’m sure, with many others, it’s because the original was a hard R, and I was only a few months old when T2 first hit. It was, of course, also rated R… but it seemed like the parents, toy manufacturers, and junk food purveyors of the world had all tacitly agreed that it was totally a movie for kids. I have friends now who have children, and some of them tell me they don’t even let their kids watch Star Wars. I pity them.)
And yet, it might be this very straightforwardness in Cameron’s style that has led many to dismiss his work as lacking in nuance or complexity. But besides the fairly obvious commentary on America’s handling of the Vietnam War (on both its questionable underlying motives and ham-fisted handling) and ’80s corporate greed, Aliens only works as well as it does because it gets you sufficiently attached to its characters as it hurtles through its streamlined plot. It’s ultimately a story about the bonds and loyalty that develop between survivors, and every character of consequence is given a distinct voice and a fitting resolution.
Corporate sleazeball Burke gets his comeuppance. Vasquez and the rest of the colonial marines gain a grudging respect for the enemy they’d so flippantly underestimated. When the chips are down, the magnificent blowhard Hudson acquits himself in a way that the “ultimate badass” he claims to be wouldn’t be ashamed of, and even their ineffectual leader Gorman proves his devotion to his men. Despite being liabilities throughout much of the movie, you’re sad to see them go. Ripley and the cool-headed Hicks win mutual respect and rely on each other’s judgment to see things through for everyone else. The android Bishop proves his integrity on multiple occasions, and Ripley, for her part, overcomes her unfair prejudice against his kind.
Most importantly, the unfailing devotion Ripley has for the child Newt ultimately becomes the crux of the film’s emotional stakes. Its survival gives the movie’s ending an sense of hope utterly absent in the original, even if the cast is nearly as decimated. Regardless of how harrowing the events of his films are, Cameron always seems to sign off on a life-affirming note, his endings laced with an underlying optimism. The man’s got a real redemptive streak.
Cameron’s directness also carries over into his work as a screenwriter, and it’s for his work in this area that he’s copped the most flak over the years. But while the clear, straightforward conveying of information that makes his visual storytelling so brilliant isn’t always appropriate for realistic character dialogue, a strange side effect of living in the internet age is that it’s become apparent how meme-worthy many of his lines are. Beyond the benefits to the structure and pace of his scripts, I’d venture his streamlined approach is responsible for this. Like his plotlines, his lines are imbued with enough built-in context that their sentiment is clearly apparent, lending to their application in a variety of scenarios. It’s why Aliens remains one of the most quotable movies of all time this side of Mean Girls (there’s Casablanca, but I get the sense it’s less a case of people quoting the movie than its most memorable lines simply having entered the lexicon), and lines from The Terminator, T2, and Titanic continue to referenced by audiences as well as other movies.
Part Two: The King of the World
Speaking of Titanic, perhaps no movie of Cameron’s has had its reputation suffer as much from the hazy recollections of hindsight as his most dramatically ambitious work. But before I get to that, it bears contextualizing the kind of stature the movie enjoyed in its heyday. It was the first of his films for which I was fully conscious at release, and man, if you weren’t around for it or don’t remember, let me tell you: it was a genuine phenomenon. Critics gave it glowing reviews, it swept almost every awards show, and people flocked to it to the tune of $1.8 billion (earned over an unprecedented 15 straight weeks at the top of the box office, with very little week-on-week attrition). Titanic’s influence could be felt in all corners of pop culture for years afterwards, from Resident Evil: Code Veronica’s Leo stand-in Steve Burnside to the bizarre bridge of Britney Spears’ “Oops!… I Did It Again”.
Going by the cultural discourse today though, you’d be forgiven for thinking the acclaim surrounding the film was the result of a bizarre Y2K fever dream. Though still generally warmly regarded, a not-insignificant sector remember it as little more than a soap opera on a sinking ship, which cashed its checks by luring in teenage girls by the drove with the dreamy posturings of one Jack Dawson; Cameron’s character, of course, having been replaced in the collective consciousness by matinee idol Leo. Never mind that Jack served a purpose other than codifying the hairdo that would birth Nick Carter and an entire legion of second-stringers besides. Jack as he exists in the film is the embodiment of its core values — the self-determination that enables you to live on your own terms, and boundless joie de vivre in the face of the obstacles encountered in its course — as well as the lens through which Cameron explores the class issues that underlie the film’s two halves of love story and disaster movie.
So too has the even more nuanced central protagonist Rose often been reduced to a handful of catchphrases and pedantic debates about the space she occupies on a floating door. As mentioned, Titanic doubles as both epic romance and disaster flick, but it’s Rose’s personal growth that anchors the entire film and serves as its emotional throughline. Her journey as she grapples with the social forces that impose on her identity and grows in confidence until she can assert her own values on the world around her is a universal one that anyone who’s ever been a young person can relate or aspire to. It’s the real reason the movie resonated so powerfully with teenage girls (and really, with human beings of all stripes; you don’t make $1.8 billion by catering to a single demographic). Cameron’s long been lauded for putting female characters front and center in his films even before it became fashionable, and Rose might be the most powerful of them all, despite her never firing a gun or doing any onscreen pull-ups.
The romance and tragedy really exist to serve Rose’s story, and the movie’s most emotionally powerful scenes are those depicting her making pivotal decisions with far-reaching consequences: jumping from the lifeboat she shared with her mother, thus definitively leaving behind the life she knew behind her, and mustering the physical and emotional strength to blow the whistle that would save her life, taking the ethos Jack imparted to heart. This is why the love story works so well — not because of the beauty of the participants and the setting, or the social subversiveness of its premise — but because we’re made to believe that these two individuals would be drawn to one another. They’re each exactly what the other needed to grow into their full, true selves. In Rose, Jack found a kindred spirit who shared his adventurousness and yearning to extract more substance out of life than most, and at the same time gave center and direction to his “rootless existence”. And Jack, in seeing her for who she was instead of the role society had forced her to play, helped Rose find the conviction and self-worth needed not just to value her life, but take charge of it. At the film’s outset, she feels so trapped that she considers suicide her best recourse; by the end, we see photographs of a long, fulfilled life decorating her bedside. It’s powerful, effective storytelling.
Some people have remarked to me what an outlier they feel Titanic is in Cameron’s body of work, I suppose due to his predilection for combat-heavy sci-fi. But I feel it’s resolutely of a kind with the rest of his oeuvre, perhaps even more than the likes of say, The Abyss. Guillermo del Toro had once said, “By the time I’m done with my career, I’ll have metaphorically done one movie… You make one movie. Hitchcock did one movie all his life.” What he’s referring to is the auteur theory boiled down to its most basic tenet — that all work made by an artist conveys a particular set of ideas representative of their point of view. And in Cameron’s case, the story he seems to tell again and again is of people using crisis as a catalyst to find out, and become, who they really are.
In some ways, Titanic serves as an apotheosis for concepts previously explored in Cameron’s prior projects, notably the brief but life-altering romance between Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese in The Terminator. Rose’s arc also echoes the self-actualization undergone by Helen Tasker (Jamie Lee Curtis’ character) in True Lies, who begins the film with remarkably little agency over her own life. The ordeal of Titanic’s passengers mirrors Ripley’s decision to take charge when the systems and figures of authority meant to mitigate situations and protect the people around her prove woefully inadequate. They’re shot similarly too — the image of Jack from Rose’s perspective as she descends on the lifeboat never fails to remind me of the Terminator’s view of John Connor in T2’s closing scenes in the steel mill.
But perhaps the Cameron stamp easiest to overlook is the lean, mechanical precision with which it’s put together, which belies its three-and-a-quarter hour runtime. Titanic the film boasts possibly even greater structural integrity than its engineering marvel of a namesake. It never plods, and every scene conveys information that will come into play later or adds an interesting facet to the story being told. Cameron’s fond of releasing special editions to his films that often restore insight into character motivations that add richness to their behavior in the rest of the film, but nonetheless aren’t essential to the story’s effectiveness (e.g. Ripley learning about the death of her daughter during her long cryo-sleep in Aliens, John talking his mother down from destroying their allied Terminator while vulnerable in T2). Perhaps because of Titanic’s unique structure or how integral the character work is to the effectiveness of the action, he seems to have exercised an ethos more similar to these editions than his usual theatrical releases. It’s a wise choice.
The elegance with which even the long framing device centered on Bill Paxton’s treasure hunter Brock Lovett serves several crucial story functions didn’t become apparent to me until later viewings. While the scenes’ length or very inclusion would indeed be a tad indulgent if the point of the movie were either the romance or the tragic disaster, they instead serve to place Rose front-and-center as the hero of our tale. Her role on the Titanic’s ill-fated maiden voyage is significant for our purposes due to the monumental role it played in the shaping of her person.
The opening half of the bookends also serves an important stylistic function in that it eases us into the world of the film. Titanic is a grand, sweeping story in the old Hollywood tradition, set in a bygone, pre-World War era of mankind’s history, but one that’s being told in the ’90s and for posterity. Because of that, the world it presents can be as alien to the more jaded viewers of its time as Pandora or LV-426; at the same time, it’s absolutely essential that these viewers buy into its sincerity.
The sassy, wisecracking scientists and explorers of Lovett’s team thus serve as our surrogates, displaying a more pragmatic, detached approach to the Titanic disaster, a mood echoed in the cooler, more muted color palette of the bookend scenes. The team also pulls double-duty in explaining the mechanics of the sinking so that when we encounter them viscerally later in the film, our immersion needn’t be broken by clumsy exposition. It’s through interacting with them that the elder Rose (who’s able to match them sass for sass) draws them — and us — into her emotional reality. These interactions also serve to build up to the reveal of the ship itself, growing its mystique and allure, and ensuring that its historical and cultural significance is apparent regardless of an individual viewer’s familiarity with the incident. Not unlike the way Steven Spielberg did in Jurassic Park, Cameron allows us to revel in the wonder and awe of the movie’s central conceit before he unleashes its terror.
In fact, the movie’s so tightly plotted that every time I watch it and the ship inevitably hits that iceberg, I find myself asking, “Is that it? Is that all they get? Is that all we get?” Like Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese, Jack and Rose never get to bask in their newfound love. They don’t get a montage of happy moments, and there’s no act in the movie’s structure that they spend the majority of in a harmonious relationship. Not in a Cameron film. They get together, evade capture, share one moment of bliss, then Jimmy’s back in his work clothes and we’re in for 40 nautical miles of bad sea trails. (…I’ll see myself out.)
Part Three: I Know Now Why You Cry
Where Titanic’s reputation is often flattened to resemble little more than an extension of its cheesy (though let’s admit it, pretty great) Celine Dion anthem, Cameron’s other opus, Terminator 2: Judgment Day suffers from a similar, but in some ways, opposite, problem. Though still almost universally beloved, discourse around the movie is often restricted to its ubiquitous iconography, its revolutionary-for-the-time visual effects, the now-almost-unbelievable stunt work, and the direction of the set pieces, which are the finest of Cameron’s career. But while these all mark a monumental leap forward from the first film, it’s the sophistication in the film’s storyline and its expansion on the concepts Cameron previously introduced that earn its stripes as one of the greatest sequels ever produced.
The misunderstanding of its virtues is possibly seen most clearly in the numerous sequels that have popped up in its wake, almost all of which style themselves after the template established by T2, but lack the fundamental ingredients behind its success. The most recent, 2019’s Dark Fate, arguably comes the closest. Though it breaks little new ground with its scenario and the ideas it puts forward, it tells a coherent story driven by the believable motivations of its characters and boasts some reasonably compelling action (though lacking that Cameronian tightness and tangibility), at least when it doesn’t go overboard with implausible tableaus almost entirely made with CGI. It’s also the only one to have Cameron’s involvement (he’s credited as producer and one of the story writers).
But in its opening scenes, Dark Fate unceremoniously offs John Connor in a move that feels as disingenuous as the one pulled on Hicks and Newt in David Fincher’s disowned Alien³. The decision was apparently Cameron’s, who felt that the death of such a central figure in the series’ mythology would immediately demarcate the new entry and subvert audience expectations — ever economical in his storytelling, Cameron suggested “[putting] a bullet in his head at a pizzeria in the first 45 seconds.”
He’s not wrong in his assessment, of course. But more than anything else, what the anecdote demonstrates is just how complete and airtight Cameron’s pair of films are, to the extent that follow-ups can’t help becoming either derivative or completely disconnected from the story he was trying to tell. The leader of the human resistance in future war against the machines controlled by the rogue A.I. Skynet, John is described as the only hope for humanity’s survival, and his shadow looms large over both movies. He first appears in T2, however, where, far from humanity’s savior, he’s a delinquent preteen boy marked by Skynet for assassination.
The presence of a child in what’s supposed to be an intense, (ostensibly) R-rated movie has been singled out by some as T2’s only flaw, with criticism levied at Edward Furlong’s performance. But John isn’t just some tag-along added to deliver punchlines and ramp up tension; he’s the moral heart of the movie. And while Furlong admittedly comes across as broad in John’s introductory scenes, where he’s in full early ’90s Bart Simpson mode, he acquits himself as well as any child actor could in some of the film’s quieter, more dramatic moments. There’s a scene in particular, after he and the Terminator have liberated Sarah from the mental institution, narrowly escaping the clutches of the T-1000. It’s the first time mother and son have seen each other in years, and immediately Sarah berates John for putting his life at risk to rescue her, stressing that he was “too important”. John sits wordlessly and takes it, accepting the truth of her words while knowing he also could have done no differently. Furlong’s expression perfectly sells the pain and confusion of a child lacking the authority or verbal rhetoric to rationalize actions they nevertheless have conviction in.
And conviction, he has in spades. When Sarah sets off to assassinate Miles Dyson, the man responsible for creating Skynet and therefore causing the eponymous Judgment Day (in which Skynet eradicates most of humanity in a nuclear holocaust), John drags his Terminator protector out of their safe haven to stop her. Defying his mother’s orders, he puts his life at risk once again, this time to save that of a complete stranger, as well as her own soul. When the Terminator points out how tactically sound Sarah’s intended actions were for ensuring humanity’s survival, John responds, “Haven’t you learned anything?” He had taught the learning computer that human life couldn’t be taken for granted, and that killing was thus never justified, and is baffled that it couldn’t see the hypocrisy in his mother’s plans.
It’s the choices that Sarah and John each make in light of the knowledge given to them about their futures that elevates T2’s story into something greater than the straightforward survival yarn of its predecessor. It’s also in these choices that Cameron demonstrates that despite the boy’s rough edges and occasionally obnoxious attitude, there’s clearly something special about him. Despite years without a stable guiding presence in his life, John possesses an innate sense of righteousness stronger than that of anyone around him. He intrinsically grasps the value of human life, and despite his grand destiny, doesn’t place his own above anyone else’s. Regardless of the circumstances, he refuses time and again to make moral compromises. Grasping the opportunity to avert Judgment Day by stopping Miles Dyson, John tries something that occurred to neither his fanatical mother nor his cold, logical protector: he appeals to his reason. John Connor isn’t the messiah humanity needs because he can match the machines in their tactical brilliance, it’s because he embodies the very things that separate us from them.
Far from being a liability, John’s presence in the story is what sets T2 apart from imitators, and most action films in general. It turns Schwarzenegger’s marquee figure into an actual character, an individual acting on the basis of his own set of principles, forged through his relationship with John.
The farewell scene at the end hits so damn hard because by that point, we’ve formed an emotional attachment to him like John has. His decision to be destroyed reads not just as a machine fulfilling its programming, but an individual making a sacrifice in service of his values.
In 1999 and again in 2002, I had the good fortune to visit the Universal Studios Hollywood theme park. Besides Jurassic Park: The Ride, there was one other attraction that captured my fascination above all others. It was called T2-3D: Battle Across Time — a combination walk-through experience, short film, and live stage show based on Cameron’s movie, remarkable in that Cameron himself directed all the pre-recorded video segments, with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, and a visibly older Edward Furlong all returning to reprise their roles.
The attraction’s premise casts you as a visitor to the facilities of Cyberdyne Systems, the company responsible for creating Skynet. While waiting in their lobby, you’re shown a corporate promotional video advertising Cyberdyne’s latest breakthroughs and the differences they’ll make in the lives of the public. This video is suddenly interrupted by the Connors, who’ve come to put a stop to Cyberdyne and warn your audience group about the upcoming machine uprising they’re about to facilitate. Even for this literal theme park attraction, Cameron doesn’t let up with his characterization: where Sarah’s rage and bile make her come off as a crazed terrorist (for all her grit and badassery, Sarah’s never been good at optics), the calm, measured John is empathetic and reassuring.
It’s a neat bit of fun, and the only sequel to Terminator 2 I’ll ever need. If you get the chance to check it out, I highly recommend it — the attraction’s been closed at Universal Studios Hollywood and Florida, but is apparently still running in Japan. But if not, no problemo. I think Jimmy’s told us exactly what he wanted to say.
The unknown future rolls towards us. I face it for the first time with a sense of hope, because if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life… maybe we can too.
