Freakin' Awesome Network Forums - James Cameron

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What's your opinion on James Cameron? To me, his best work was always
Terminator 1, Ailens, Terminator 2 & to some extent True Lies. He can
be a serviceable director when given good material but to me his worst
big budgeted film is Titanic (which was a HUGE successful borefest).
And Avatar well let's just say that the music & the effects were the
only good things about that film. While I liked the concept of The
Abyss, its execution was less than stellar despite having some good
effects.

« Reply #2 Yesterday at 9:08am »
The guy has making money down to an art form, and yet no one really
seems like they can figure out that the most important thing he does
is take a summer popcorn movie and release it during the slow season
where it has little competition for weeks on end. I guess people are
so engrained in the summer = big budget action tradition to see that
he makes hundreds of millions turning it on it's head.

His best work is those movies where he doesn't have to worry about
coming up with story. The Terminator movies were famously cribbed from
Harlan Ellison written TV episodes. Aliens took the original movie and
made it a pretty standard action movie in terms of story (although, to
be fair, it was still a great action movie). True Lies was based on a
book. The Abyss, one of Cameron's own, started interested, but he had
no idea how to write a satisfying conclusion. Titanic's story was
really what anyone would come up with if you told them to come up with
a love story set on the Titanic. Avatar was Dances with Wolves in
space with furries.

High budget special effects? Absolutely, he's one of the best and most
successful. Nuanced characters and a genuinely intriguing story? He's
rarely successful. They're certainly not bad movies by a long shot,
but I don't think you'll ever really be surprised by anything you get
in a typical Cameron movie.