best james cameron feature film

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 think Michael Biehn as an action hero is supremely underrated, his back-to-back roles in Terminator and Aliens are two sides of the same coin and really interestingly vulnerable at the time they were released, in how these are a pair of strong, wary, brave, smart men who at various points defer to and depend on the female hero.

yeah, it’s a real shame biehn didn’t go on to a more high-profile career, partic since everyman action heroes were about to be a big thing after die hard

i think even the everyman action heroes of the post-die hard era were pretty cocky dudes, Biehn i think was too believably low-key and measured compared to Bruce Willis and some other actors. i like this bit of Alien 3 trivia:

Walter Hill and David Giler penned the final script, which had Hicks killed off in the opening scene. Biehn, upon learning of his character's demise, demanded and received almost as much money for the use of his likeness in one scene as he had been paid for his role in Aliens.

damn right, get that money

God what a great collection of patchwork claptrap

james cameron still GOAT. pic.twitter.com/dFAnVfr8Dh

— Peter LabuzAAAHH! (@labuzamovies) October 16, 2019

the propeller dude in titanic rules bc james cameron was like “this is going to be a respectful and purposeful recreation of a tragedy, except for one guy.”

— 🩸Miss Gender🩸 (@girldrawsghosts) September 20, 2022

Maybe that happened to a Titanic guy and he would’ve appreciated someone telling his story.

i hadn't seen it in 25 years and remembered v little about it besides it ending with ed harris chilling with aliens on the ocean floor but the abyss totally rocked my shit

avatar 2 inspired me to do a cameron marathon obv. i skipped pirahna 2 bc there's seemingly legit uncertainty over how much of it he directed (even though i know from a terminator doc i just watched that he was involved in post-production? unclear. the credits sequence rocks though). i think i prefer the aliens extended cut these days, it's such a richly-constructed environment why not live in it for fifteen more minutes

michael biehn is so fucking good

how did you watch the abyss? i'd like to see it but my understanding is that isn't super easy to do.

yeah i had to use methods

i also like your comment about aliens, i think that's the best thing about that movie and why it's my favorite cameron of the ones i've seen

have read at least one report that an abyss blu-ray will finally come out next year, but i've heard that one before

there is a really nice looking copy ~out there~ that i believe briefly appeared on streaming? def blu quality

The making-of doc about The Abyss (called Under Pressure, I believe) is pretty interesting if you can find it.

Did not look like a fun thing to make! Also the fact that they shot the majority of the underwater stuff in a giant, unfinished nuclear power plant containment tank is fucking wild.

i watched it last night! what a stupidly hard movie to make

there's a bit on the ILM documentary about how they did the effects for the water creature in the abyss, fun stuff

think the last time i heard about a filmmaker filming something in an abandoned nuclear power site it was tarkovsky/stalker and he died of cancer afterwards

key for Cameron and co was the choice to shoot in an unfinished nuclear power plant and not an abandoned one

There was a western film which was shot near a nuclear test site and similarly lots of cast and crew died of cancer (John Wayne being one of them iirc)

that was his Genghis Kahn movie, The Conqueror. everything about that thing sounded like a disaster.

also yeah, xxp that multi-part Industrial Light & Magic doc on Disney+ is excellent, especially the earlier episodes covering its more Wild West days.