best james cameron feature film

Yeah dyao, empty action keeps the masses mollified. Whatever works.

right morbius because the enjoyment of action scenes is completely predicated upon your inclusion in the third estate

I'm gonna go watch Jeanne dielman to purge myself of my populist leanings

Jeanne Dielman has plenty of action in it if you know what i'm sayin

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Piranha II no contest and this guy is horrible in general

T2 but i mean i'll sit and watch any of the others if they're on tv.

goddamn it i should have voted for aliens over t2

not too late to start a cool new sock!!!

anthony lane is an aliens stan iirc

A question for Abyss stans: I have not seen this & am thinking maybe I should. Being a sfx-laden sci-fi joint from the late 80s, has it aged well, or is a "had to be there" kind of thing?

iirc it's pretty great until the amusement park pops up

Haven't seen it for donkeys years, but as I remember the non-CGI alien bits of the Abyss are better - it's a fairly tense underwater spy thriller (or something to that effect, like I say it's been ages).

And I just went for Terminator over Aliens after a minute of dithering between the two with the cursor.

s1ocki otm. also the abyss got me into linda ronstadt, so it has a special place in my underwater amusement park

by god what a run. The Abyss though.

Goddammit, you bitch! You never backed away from anything in your life! Now fight!
is a random catch-phrase btwn my brother and i

i am torn btwn Aliens and Terminator...
okay, Terminator

Aliens, easily. The Terminator and T2 are close, with The Abyss a distant fourth, though it has aged pretty well.

Yeah I voted The Abyss.

Aliens. Wanted to go with Terminator, but Aliens edges it out in almost every category: more quotable, more memorable, more suspenseful, more fun. Plus way more ambitious. Could say the same for T2, I suppose, but I don't dig the characters in that one half as much. If it weren't for the ending, the Abyss might have been in the running. And True Lies is horrible crap.

Not my favourite, but Abyss has aged fine.

the time travel is what tips the scales in favour of Terminator, for me, tbh

Piranha II no contest and this guy is horrible in general

"lolz"

<3 all these movies p much but terminator is just n/l

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

lol ok then

Finally saw The Abyss and was really pleased with it right up until the ending, where it would have really benefited from being much vaguer, closer to Close Encounters or even more than that - our heroes could still be 'saved' but in more of a mysterious/miraculous way. (This may be vague but I'm sort of trying to avoid spoilers even though this movie is like twenty-five years old - - - my sense is a lot of people, at least my age, are like me and never got around to it? I was too young for this and then just the right age for T2 to be my first R-rated movie.) Kind of throws off the focus of the story and the intensity of our small band of humans confronting the knowable and unknowable fears in the deep. Apparently the special edition goes even more in on the goofy/top-side stuff which sounds really bad IMO.

But for all that - some fucking incredible scenes. The big near-death climax is fucking riveting even on VHS and a tiny screen. And great to see Michael Biehn in a role that sort of uses his type-casting standards and then totally plays against your expectations of that. And generally it looks great, everything is lavishly shot.. There are one or two shots that are the equivalent of the moment in Aliens when the queen waves off the drones and it just looks really awkwardly like a guy in a rubber suit shuffling politely back out of the room. But would recommend it.

I can't believe anybody voted for True Lies which is just grotesque and awful.

I would vote for Terminator 2. The timey wimey stuff was thrilling and yet just shallow enough that it didn't get in the way of Ahnold being a silly robot trying to be hip to a proto-hacker kid in-between fighting against liquid metal cop from the future. Plus that one minute of future Judgement day time war w skeleton-looking robots crushing skulls under their feet is still one of the coolest visions of horrific technologic dystopia ever.

Haven't seen "The Abyss" in ages, so gave it another go. Still think it's pretty underrated, but man, the dialogue - it's so ruthlessly on the nose and clunky, at least for a long while, with every single line blatantly conveying a character beat/trait or explicitly foreshadowing. Every line is like "Now be careful here, boys, one touch of that red wire is enough the paralyze a man for life!" Or, "With this storm approaching, we better be careful, otherwise, we may be isolated, which would be a problem if one of us gets the bends, which is a condition that ..." Etc.

On the plus side, it gets going pretty efficiently, introducing everyone and the scenario in a fraction of the time it takes "Aliens" to get going, and the acting/casting is as top notch as the aforementioned as well. And once it gets going it's pretty great, until it realizes it needs an ending that also involves aliens. Would have been a great thriller simply about rescuing nukes from a sub while a SEAL goes nuts.

Just watched The Abyss again, had it on in the background as the latest in a string of familiar-films-to-play while working through a kind of tedious organizational project. I totally see what JiC is saying above but man is it good anyway. I totally gave up working halfway through and just rode through the string of climaxes. Ed Harris is so fucking intense in this that really any flaws are forgiven - there's SUCH a clear, strong, raw human story at the center of the effects and the environments and the nuclear-bomb plot. Maybe Cameron's only effective tear-jerker? Really underrated IMO.

yeah that's a great movie. not perfect but a good ride and well acted. it suffered at the time of its release from coming out in the year of deep sea alien thrillers, so it got lost inh the shuffle a bit w/deepstar six and leviathan. I think it may have even been the last of those to come out and people passed it by as a result.

and it's still unavailable on Blu Ray isn't it? wtf is that about.

give true lies' votes to piranha 2 and these would be the best poll results on ilx: the two Ts unchoosable between, aliens asymptotically close, abyss and titanic on the same tier of "will listen to arguments for", avatar omitted

maybe it would be better if piranha 2 had 9 votes

Supposedly The Abyss (original cut) is on Netflix in HD at the moment. Baffling there's STILL no Blu Ray.

sometimes i consider The Terminator to be his best because it's his least sentimental major film, it's just this cold and dark and metal movie, it's basically a slasher movie with a time travel wormhole. Cameron really explores some amazing science fiction ideas in that movie, though, without it being one of those movies where the special fx were the part he wanted to show off, rather than the means to the end in a *story* he wanted to show off. Aliens fits there too, though its worst parts are the sentimental bits, fortunately occurring only in several quick moments and never at the expense of the story.

Aliens is one of the cases where the director's cut made the film worse.

Terminator definitely his best. It’s so resourceful & thoughtfully crafted.

yeah the aliens director's cut really needs to be pulled from circulation or treated as a weird curiosity in the dvd. like the close encounters and star wars special editions it's pretty obvious the film is being made draggier and less focused whatever else the problems are.

hey i like the aliens director’s cut!

i mean the original cut is perfect but idk i don’t mind the occasional sentimentality of that movie at all

i’d argue that the t2 director’s cut is mostly unnecessary but there’s that wonderful scene where sarah almost smashed the terminator’s chip that really should’ve been in the original cut

the problems imho with the aliens director's cut aren't to do with sentimentality but with pacing and the unfolding of the story - the auto-guns scene is neat but comes at a time when it breaks the ramping-up of to the barrage of climaxes, and all the added stuff in the first act bogs things down similarly, plus seeing that the company sent the colonists out there robs the film of any "have they reformed? is this on the level?" tension. which obv is less of an issue when you've seen it ten times but to me they are classic cases of the right decision having been made back in the editing bay when the filmmaker was in the zone and making the tough choice to cut out good scenes that were tough and expensive to shoot because they aren't helping the film work.

this is all true! i still like it, mostly bc i have the beats of the original all memorized

Terminator definitely his best. It’s so resourceful & thoughtfully crafted.

Co-sign. Been a few years, but that grim air of impending doom hanging over everything really struck me last viewing. To say nothing of its other many virtues.

Did we say abyss theatrical or extended?

theatrical i think? iirc the deleted stuff there makes the on-the-surface plotline make slightly more sense but it's not needed, and the more we see/know about the ending the weaker it is... same logic as close encounters. i believe there are some great effects shots in there, but it's also possible these have dated way worse than his usual fare.

cameron makes long, but efficient films... adding stuff back in tends to make them less efficient and strain one's patience for a popcorn movie.

Thks

the abyss is like 2/3 of a really good movie but tbh the making-of documentary is at least as good as the film itself - what an insane production

The Terminator is amazing, fire everything else

I read the Orson Scott Card adaptation! iirc there were maps!

Terminator > Terminator 2

I couldn't remember whether I had seen The Abyss till I read a synopsis, and . . . I'm pretty sure I've seen it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4k1y6TGW24I

I haven't seen The Abyss since it first hit video stores. The only thing I can remember is the liquid breathing apparatus.

None of my usual theaters have any screenings listed yet. Looks like tickets go on sale next Monday, so hopefully one of them will announce it between now and then.