James Cameron is a straight up risk-taking maniac. He keeps swinging for the fences with every movie. The result is a career filled with industry game changers, but what’s the best movie he’s ever made?
The AV Club has ranked all nine of Cameron’s films. I can’t say I agree with the ranking. “Titanic” is too low and “Avatar: The Way of Water” (#4) way too high. It’s interesting how after more than 40 years of filmmaking, Cameron has only managed to release none films in his career. Damn you, Avatar!
Cameron is 68, he still has quite a few films left in him, but I hope he doesn’t revert to only making ‘Avatar’ for the rest of his career. He’s too talented to be stuck with that franchise. Variety’s Owen Gleiberman agrees:
“We already have a movie culture that’s drowning in imagistic sensation and action overload. Cameron, in movies like “The Terminator”, “Aliens”, “The Abyss” and “Terminator 2: Judgment Day”, was one of the virtuoso architects of that blockbuster aesthetic. He’s now competing against the very cinema-as-sensation mystique that overpowered the rest of movie culture, even as he raises the ante on it.“
It may be hard to imagine that Cameron, the man behind some of the highest-grossing, and most expensive, movies of all time, started his career making B-movies. But he did — and one of them, his debut, was one of the worst creature features ever created: “Piranha II: The Spawning”.
Back in 1982, Cameron worked as a special effects supervisor for the ‘Piranha’ sequel when the director left the project, giving him the opportunity to take over. The only good thing to come out of his misadventure — that involved power struggles with the producer and a dangerous fever —was inspiration to eventually write “The Terminator”.
Cameron has made about a half dozen great movies in his career, but I always revert back to “The Terminator,” his first big studio project. The practical effects, the vision and the masterful mix of sci-fi and horror — is it hard to imagine that Cameron absolutely peaked with this one? He’d go on to get balloon-sized budgets for the rest of his career, but the creative juices were never better for him than in that 1984 masterpiece.
Here’s how I rank his filmography: (1) The Terminator (2) T2: Judgement Day (3) Titanic (4) Aliens (5) The Abyss (6) Avatar (7) True Lies (8) Avatar: The Way of Water (9) Piranha II
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