![\"'Piranha](\"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/wp-content\/themes\/vip\/pmc-hollywoodreporter-2021\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.gif\")
\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Columbia Pictures\/Courtesy Everett Collection\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\tA man directs the most expensive movie in history. His next film costs twice as much \u2014 and makes more money than any movie ever. His next earns more. He dives to the deepest point in the ocean, travels to Antarctica, advises NASA, farms. He marries various fascinating women. He draws his dreams; a nightmare about a flaming metal skeleton becomes the most popular character ever played by the 38th governor of California. His success accelerates or invents Hollywood macro-trends: computer animation, digital 3D, the cruciality of the Chinese box office, Leo. Decades of video games (Doom, Halo, Gears of War) are unthinkable without his influence. You can only describe him with paradoxes: high-tech tree hugger, macho feminist, angry Canadian. He stops eating meat and calls himself a \u201cFuturevore\u201d because he doesn\u2019t like the word \u201cvegan.\u201d His first gig and ongoing passion is special effects, which is why some critics say he loves things more than people. But his most famous films \u2014 the most famous films \u2014 involve swooning romance, sweet kids in peril, lotsa crying and C\u00e9line Dion. So even people who hate James Cameron know the man has a heart.<\/p>\n
\n\tAvatar: Fire and Ash is only the ninth feature he\u2019s directed (unless you count the mutant fish, and we must). Still, it\u2019s a leviathan career. The ranking that follows features the greatest female and male action heroes of the \u201880s, the It Boy of the \u201890s, the worst theatrical trend of the \u201810s, the most successful movie of the \u201820s, heroic alien princesses, disgusting alien queens, evil cyborgs, lovable synthetics, waterlogged boats, crashed ships, fathoms below, stars beyond, a goddess and a whole lot of construction equipment. There\u2019s a messiah, too, a man destined to save the world. The man\u2019s initials, of course, are J.C.<\/p>\n
\t10. Piranha 2: The Spawning (1982)<\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Columbia Pictures\/Courtesy Everett Collection\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
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I do not like watching Arnold Schwarzenegger torment Jamie Lee Curtis, and I do not like watching Arnold Schwarzenegger tango. Still, this list can only start with the flying piranhas. Fired mid-production, Cameron generally disowns his directorial debut. It would be impolite to note The Spawning features several of his hallmarks: sexy no-bullshit hero mom, underwater photography, broken marriage salvaged with action banter, Lance Henriksen, Vietnam\u2019s thematic shadow, somebody wearing a bandana on their forehead, a whole movie happening because a ship sinks. And it would be career suicide for any critic to applaud the opening scene, where two randy Scuba divers try to copulate in a shipwreck before evil fish eat them alive. Doesn\u2019t that sound more fun than watching Arnold Schwarzenegger\u2019s stunt double ride a horse?<\/p>\n
\t9. True Lies (1994)<\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\tAs James Hibberd points out in his excellent new profile of the director,<\/a> you don\u2019t often hear stories about James Cameron being nice. Usually, though, you trust the sincerity of his intensity. He\u2019s in the trenches with his exhausted casts and crews, revolutionizing his craft, drowning in ideas, drowning in actual water. He\u2019s rude for a higher purpose. The exception is True Lies, a jerk movie for assholes. Schwarzenegger\u2019s secret agent hunts terrorists from a swank Swiss gala to the elevators of Washington, D.C. Then he forgets about the villains for a while to conduct fun Orwellian surveillance on his wife. Credit Jamie Lee Curtis for acting her face off as the bored (though never boring) regular spouse improvising herself into sultry-tough spyhood. She\u2019s stuck in Cameron\u2019s most indulgent boomfest. You like dick jokes? Art Malik\u2019s extremist villain crotch-slams onto a fighter jet; Bill Paxton\u2019s sleazebag salesman pisses himself twice. Absent is Cameron\u2019s usual rebel spirit, that snarly half-hippie distrust of any well-funded military-industrial institution. Heavily armed uniformed men in his movies tend to be impotent, cowardly or monstrous. True Lies lets Harry declare, with swagger and no irony: \u201cOK, Marines, it\u2019s time to kick ass!\u201d Send this loser to LV-426.<\/p>\n \t8.5. Ghosts of the Abyss (2003) \/ Aliens of the Deep (2005) \/ Aquaman (2006)<\/p>\n \t\t\t \n\t \t8. Avatar (2009)<\/p>\n \t\t\t \n\t \t7. The Abyss (1989)<\/p>\n \t\t\t \n\t \t6. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)<\/p>\n \t\t\t \n\t \t5. Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025)<\/p>\n \t\t\t \n\t \t4.\u00a0 Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)<\/p>\n \t\t\t \n\t \t3. Titanic (1997)<\/p>\n \t\t\t \n\t \n\tThe daylight CGI looks chintzy now. Billy Zane is smarm and lips. It\u2019s weird Fabrizio has nothing to do. None of which matters, because in the lead roles Cameron cast a couple up-and-comers who became two of their generation\u2019s great screen personalities. Leonardo DiCaprio makes Jack seem wounded and yearning when he talks about his bohemian art boy wanderings. Kate Winslet\u2019s eyes flare with desperation and humor as she swans around First Class. On the prow at sunset, they\u2019re Romance incarnate. And when history comes for them, they never let go. The chemistry keeps the movie shocking and alive on rewatch. Even knowing the plot beats of doom, you find yourself hoping these two crazy kids might just make it. In the end, maybe they do? Life only lasts a lifetime. Hearts go on.\u00a0<\/p>\n \t2. Aliens (1986)<\/p>\n \t\t\t \n\tIt\u2019s so quiet. Fandom recalls this Alien sequel as the heavy-metal sequel, pluralizing Ridley Scott\u2019s claustrophobic original by airdropping jarheads into a creature colony. Worth remembering the monsters don\u2019t show up until the one-hour mark. Instead, Sigourney Weaver\u2019s Ripley awakens from cryo-slumber to disgrace and demotion. With no prospects beyond cargo-load detail, she joins a mission with the Colonial Marines. These \u201cvery tough hombres\u201d are delightful, outrageous \u2014\u00a0and the first act\u2019s default antagonists, dismissing Ripley as a weakling crank. Oh, she shows them. The action, when it comes, is magnificent. The real standout moments slither with nightmare patience: pinging motion sensors, sizzling blowtorches, an egg slime-crunching out an infernal birth canal, Carrie Henn\u2019s whispers as sole survivor Newt.<\/p>\n \n\tCameron was an artist first \u2014 his 2021 coffee-table book Tech Noir is essential reading \u2014\u00a0and he sketched a lot of Aliens\u2019 hardware himself. So there\u2019s a palpable weight to all the functionality, like the Steadicam-derived apparatus that keeps the machine guns from bouncing, or the way Ripley duct-tapes a flamethrower to her pulse rifle. When Michael Biehn\u2019s Corporal Hicks teaches her to \u201cfeel the weight\u201d of a weapon, it\u2019s an utmost Cameron gearhead moment, half flirtatious and half empowering. (Four decades later, Fire and Ash replays that sexy tutorial with heavier artillery.) The director saw a military future of smart-helmet bodycams; the xenomorphs\u2019 dots-on-a-screen approach is practically the first great Google Maps setpiece. As the brash soldiers fall under tongue tooth and claw, Aliens chest-bursts into its final form as a maternal showdown. A Queen-on-Queen duel from subterranean depths up to outer space? In the immortal words of Bill Paxton\u2019s Private Hudson: Fuckin\u2019 A.<\/p>\n \t1. The Terminator (1984)<\/p>\n \t\t\t \n\tAfter this shoestring chase film came big sets, boats, water tanks, 3D cameras and computers. Nothing wrong with that. Major directors nowadays get lost in a couple directions, embracing lifeless CGI or rooting themselves defensively in analogue craft. Cameron found a third way. In life he became a human extremophile, seeking realer realities on the ocean floor. The exploring kept him grounded while his day job pushed the techno-cinematic bleeding edge. He has always believed in the future \u2014\u00a0and worried about it. We know this because his masterwork is about someone who finds out tomorrow wants her dead.<\/p>\n \n\tFor my money, Linda Hamilton\u2019s first performance as Sarah Connor is richer than her legendary T2 toughness. For her, it\u2019s just another day of annoying customers and the dire Los Angeles dating scene. Then circumstances make her a target, a fugitive, the new Madonna and the coolest person to ever use a hydraulic press. It\u2019s always personal with Cameron, who based Sarah\u2019s personality on his sassy-waitress first wife Sharon. (With Hamilton onscreen and producer Hurd co-writing, Terminator seems less like an action flick than a feat of creative polyamory.)<\/p>\n \n\tThe apocalyptic peeks still stun. More impressive is how the director finds so much tech noir in back alleys, cheap motels and parking garages. What Terminator lacks in budget, it makes up with sheer screaming-steel relentlessness. Schwarzenegger is an unstoppable golem of firepower. Biehn\u2019s time-tossed bodyguard is a helpless scrambling David who will never defeat his Goliath. All the dudes \u2014\u00a0cops, punks, cyborgs, soldiers \u2014\u00a0are locked in a death spiral.\u00a0Salvation depends on a young woman from Big Bear becoming a prepper boymom with a jeep, a thousand-yard stare and a forehead bandana. At the height of Cold War atomic terror, The Terminator discovered the 2020s in the 1980s. It begins four years from now in a world broken by military overreach and artificial intelligence. If the storm\u2019s still coming, at least James Cameron taught us how to sink.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A man directs the most expensive movie in history. 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\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Walt Disney\/Courtesy Everett Collection; Buena Vista\/Courtesy Everett Collection; Warner Brothers Television\/Courtesy Everett Collection\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Anything Cameron did in the 1990s was the biggest thing ever. By comparison, his next decade was quiet and quirky. He tinkered with experimental cameras, explored the ocean \u2014 and made documentaries about exploring the ocean with experimental cameras. Ghosts of the Abyss and Aliens of the Deep track his oceanic expeditions with pioneering Imax 3D. (Back then, \u201cImax\u201d still meant fussy science, \u201c3D\u201d was a bygone fad and it was unlikely any half-naked blue people would ever popularize both formats.) The best thing in these shortish docs is Cameron himself: Chatting with astrobiologists about Jupiter\u2019s moons, nerding out over deepwater microbes, writing a 40-page safety manual on submersible deployment, remote-driving a camera-robot into the wreck of the Titanic to rescue another camera-robot. In hindsight we know this was all very elaborate Avatar predevelopment. At the time, his most popular contribution to 2000s culture was a different nautical adventure: Aquaman, starring Vincent Chase and Mandy Moore, the highest-grossing movie of all time on Entourage.<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: 20thCentFox\/Courtesy Everett Collection\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Putting the actual highest-grossing movie of all time at No. 8 can only seem snotty. Let me be clear: I love Avatar. I love that it\u2019s about a guy learning to groove with nature by sticking his brain-braid into cool places. I love that it\u2019s anti-colonial and anti-technology \u2014 and also about how technology helps a white man unwhiten himself. These paradoxes are handmade, reflecting its creator\u2019s far-flung interests. If True Lies was a loud midlife crisis, Avatar finds an older Cameron reconnecting with the fascinations of his youth. Hardcore science-fiction, high fantasy and a Jack Kirby-ish strain of cosmo-spiritualism background a history nut\u2019s mashup narrative: Metaphorical Pocahontas leads Metaphorical Viet Cong against Metaphorical (actual?) Americans burning rainforests for Metaphorical Oil. It can\u2019t compete with the sequels\u2019 visual gobsmack, and the dewy romance between Sam Worthington\u2019s Jake and Zoe Salda\u00f1a\u2019s Neytiri lacks the generational scope awaiting the Sully clan. Avatar planted strong roots. This Hometree grew.<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: 20th Century Fox Film Corp.\/Courtesy Everett Collection\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Would you believe me if I told you James Cameron built an ocean in a nuclear power plant? Replicating the Atlantic depths for this deep-sea thriller required pouring 7.5 million gallons of water into a defunct power station\u2019s concrete tank. Workdays were submerged. The tank leaked. Cameron\u2019s marriage to producer Gale Anne Hurd was ending. Out of that maelstrom of physical toil and emotional brinksmanship emerged the director\u2019s maddest thriller. I mean \u201cmad\u201d both ways: anger, insanity. Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio are bickering spouses uneasily reunited on a rescue mission to a downed submarine. Their submersible drilling operation gets seized by a lunatic Navy SEAL (Michael Biehn, Cameron\u2019s original go-to guy). The soldier\u2019s pressure-induced psychosis threatens to go thermonuclear when he tries blowing up the aliens with a Trident warhead. Right, yes, the aliens, lingering in the shadows of a nearby cliff. Extraterrestrial CGI earned The Abyss a visual effects Oscar, a nice grace note after the lackluster box office. It\u2019s an amazing technical achievement and probably Cameron\u2019s most personal film. (Here\u2019s the story of married collaborators who work well together yet can\u2019t stand each other \u2014 from the man who directed films with his second, fourth and fifth wives and worked on a couple great scripts for third wife Kathryn Bigelow.) It\u2019s just too bad the final act falls off its own cliff, squandering all tension in a flail for Kubrickian transcendence.<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: TriStar Pictures\/Courtesy Everett Collection\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Audiences did not flock to The Abyss. So Cameron returned to his first success, invented a new cyborg, skyrocketed the budget and conjured an R-rated kid\u2019s movie. Does that description sound reductive? I was a prepubescent T2 fanboy, bro. I remember the toys and I remember the kids at recess yelling \u201cHasta la Vista, Baby!\u201d Pitting Schwarzenegger\u2019s anvil-tough cyborg against Robert Patrick\u2019s slippery T-1000 softened the first Terminator\u2019s midnight dread into a rock-em-sock-em monster mash. Talk about a \u201990s summer: These robots meet at a mall. Edward Furlong\u2019s squeaky snarl will never be annoying, because I remember when his swoopy-haired dirt-bike dirtbag (who hacks ATMs for arcade quarters!) was the coolest big kid on Earth. Linda Hamilton carries the grown-up weight as a jagged and jacked Sarah Connor, now a psych ward nihilist with an artillery stash. The bombast gets repetitive: bullets, explosions, another truck chase. But you\u2019re made of liquid metal if your eyes don\u2019t leak when the broken Terminator tells the fatherless boy, \u201cI know now why you cry.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: 20th Century Studios\/Courtesy Everett Collection\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
The Na\u2019vi have always seemed a sensitive people, carefree in their enjoyment of nature, dutiful in their dedication to their bio-spiritual community. This threequel asks a simple question: What if one of them was absolutely bugnuts? Enter pyromaniac witch-queen Varang, James Cameron\u2019s first evil alien in 39 years. Franchise newcomer Oona Chaplin\u2019s wild performance epitomizes Fire and Ash\u2019s runaway-train grandiosity. This club has everything: marital strife, jelly-lifted airboats, a psychedelic trip, so many villains, frag arrows, the whales, the whales! Fuddy-duddy old whales sticking to institutional principles despite certain destruction; outcast rebel whales who demand action. I submit to you that these whales are the modern Democrat Party. Fortunately, 71-year-old Cameron has the artistic vitality of an angry young whale. Fire and Ash is where his inner 2001 fanboy meets his inner Conan the Barbarian child, clashing a dystopian gun-metal atmosphere with a deeper strain of B-movie pulp. Opinions certainly vary \u2014\u00a0check out David Rooney\u2019s full review here<\/a> \u2014\u00a0but I love Spider the dreadlocked cave boy and I don\u2019t care who knows it.<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy of 20th Century Studios\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Fire and Ash looks glorious in 3D, which is worth mentioning, because 3D is nauseating with anything except a James Cameron movie. He remained the format\u2019s truest believer as the post-Avatar craze dwindled through the 2010s into cheap tricks and muddy post-conversions. It was possible to worry he was getting left behind \u2014\u00a0or becoming another Peter Jackson, a dynamic storyteller lost in pointless technical innovation. After a decade of blown release dates, The Way of Water certainly looks great, ditching the first film\u2019s lush jungles for a seafoam coastline. The real surprise \u2014\u00a0the reason it\u2019s the saga\u2019s peak entry \u2014\u00a0is how much Cameron luxuriates in the emotional turbulence of the swollen Sully family. Leaving the first film\u2019s conventional love story behind, Water follows Pandora\u2019s hippest teens on divergent coming-of-age odysseys: teen romance, spiritual discovery, a vengeful maniac bio-dad. The youth focus sidelines Neytiri, a flaw I forgive after her renewed prominence in Fire and Ash. And where the third film goes dizzy from overplotting, Water is pure mood board: sun-dappled waves, elaborate creatures, the simple fact that you\u2019re kinda watching a bunch of aliens take a long beach vacation.<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: 20th Century Fox Film Corp Courtesy: Everett Collection\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
If I had to pick a single defining flaw in Cameron\u2019s career, it\u2019s the music. He never found his John Williams or his Bernard Herrmann, a musician who could enhance his visual sensibility. His most frequent composer was the late James Horner, whose penchant for old-fashioned orchestral oomph didn\u2019t really match the fantastical grime of Cameron\u2019s science fiction. (I obviously love Aliens, and I still think it would be better with no music.) But Horner gave Cameron Titanic. Irish pipes, synth choir, a Norwegian soprano vocalizing over a tinkling piano: The score is weirder and more expansive than the movie. Throw in the ultimate end-credits love anthem and you\u2019ve got a sonic vocabulary that made Titanic\u2019s phenomenon echo far outside the theater.<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: 20th Century Fox Film Corp.\/Courtesy Everett Collection\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Photofest\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n