Few franchises have had a steeper fall than the Alien series. In 1992 Alien3 appeared to near-universal derision. James Cameron nailed the essential problem when he said, “[director David] Fincher pissed me off by killing off Newt, Hicks, and Bishop, essentially trashing the entire ending of Aliens in the first few minutes of Alien3.” Absolutely correct. In the place of Cameron’s great characters, Fincher’s film substituted Sigourney Weaver’s wacky desire to have her character die, use no guns, and (in effect) “make love” to the aliens. The result was catastrophic.
And yet is that very different from the disastrous decisions Cameron himself has made since Aliens appeared in 1986? Take his Terminator franchise — the director’s initial script note when first conceiving of the sequel read, “Young John Connor and the Terminator who comes back to befriend him.” Cameron’s buddy and fellow Terminator scribe Bill Wisher remembers that “The idea of a boy and the Terminator seemed real funny to me, and we both had a good laugh about it. But after we finished laughing, Jim looked at me seriously and said this was the story we ought to do.”
For those of us who thought that a Cameron-helmed Terminator 2 would build on the space marine look-and-feel introduced in the first film and perfected in Aliens — in the process bringing the story into that way-cool dystopian future, perhaps with Sarah Connor traveling forward in time to somehow reunite with a still-living Reese and change history for the better — Cameron’s decision to make Arnold the good guy and build the movie around a Hollywoodized moppet was the worst possible outcome.
It wasn’t just the decision to make one of the greatest villains in movie history into a joke that ruined Terminator 2: Judgment Day, it was the simplistic preachiness underlying the plot. Joe Morton, the actor who portrayed the doomed Miles Dyson in the film, recalls that, “[Cameron] told me how Terminator 2 was going to be an anti-nuclear film and that it would show authority figures as the real Terminators. I had read the script and so I remember laughing and telling him ‘Sure Jim. I think kids are going to walk out of the theater after seeing this movie, saying ‘Did you see the way the Terminator shot that guy in the knees?’ But Jim insisted that it would be much more than that.”
This sort of creeping socio-political nonsense began with Cameron’s The Abyss, a film that the Los Angeles Times correctly derided by writing, “It’s not hard to think that James Cameron has carried this film in his head since he was seventeen. It’s a seventeen-year-old vision.” Terminator 2 continued that trend, and for me ruined that mythos just as Alien3 destroyed its own franchise. Sure, it made a ton of money, but hey, so did The Phantom Menace. Coming on the heels of The Abyss, it was a sign that the maker of The Terminator and Aliens had lost the essence of what made those two movies great. Twenty years later, Cameron continues to make mega-hits that fall woefully short of that early creative promise.
Making matters worse is how the director has made himself a poster boy for the mean-spirited, audience-insulting, hyperbolic trend in modern Hollywood. He’s called us right-wingers (who form a large swath of his movie-going public) “just people ranting away, lost in their little bubbles of reality, steeped in their own hatred, their own fear and hatred.” Glenn Beck “is a f***ing asshole. . . dangerous because his ideas are poisonous,” while climate-change deniers — i.e., most of the country — are “boneheads” and “swine,” with “their head so deeply up their ass I’m not sure they could hear me.”
All of this scattershot name-calling is tedious because it’s such transparent bluster. That’s why, when Cameron boldly called for a climate change debate with his conservative detractors last March, Big Hollywood’s John Nolte was able to accurately predict how it would eventually play out:
If Beck calls Cameron’s bluff (pretty please, Glenn), I’d bet all kinds of money Cameron locks himself in his air conditioned mansion and refuses to come out.
That of course is exactly what happened once Andrew Breitbart picked up the gauntlet that the director — apparently spurred on by an inflated sense of self-regard fueled by his box-office receipts and technical achievements in Hollywood — had so carelessly tossed down. We should remember what Cameron once said about his method of getting ahead in Tinseltown: “So much relies on personality and not logic. . . it’s hype. . . it’s the pitch.” That might work well when selling studio executives on sci-fi scripts, or when producing “documentaries” worthy of Erich von Däniken, but it’s a lot less effective when going up against intelligent opponents well-versed in the minutiae of real-world problems. He thought that, just like in Hollywood, he could bluff and bully his way to victory, but it was not to be. Oh well — as Cameron himself said about Sigourney Weaver after he taught her how to shoot: “Another liberal bites the dust.”
To Cameron’s credit, sometimes he does come down to earth to join the rest of us, as when he called the engineers working on the gulf oil spill “morons,” only to later backtrack and come clean with: “I got into it and I talked to petroleum engineers and we started this study group …They’re not morons. . . There are good engineers out there. . . working very hard. It’s a very, very complex problem to solve.” Indeed it is — so why not refrain from all the knee-jerk vitriol? What possible good can come of a movie director alienating huge swaths of his audience with such crude, simplistic caricatures?
This impulse hasn’t just harmed his reputation, it’s done palpable damage to his filmmaking. Increasingly, the characters in his movies are painfully one-dimensional, while his plots are chock-full of nonsensical holes. “The beauty of movies,” Cameron has said, “is that they don’t have to be logical. If there’s a visceral, cinematic thing happening that the audience likes, they don’t care if it goes against what’s likely.” In truth, many of the same fans who bristled at the criminal stupidity of other mega-hits like George Lucas’ Star Wars prequels and Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds also harbor a near-incandescent animosity for Avatar.
My suspicion is that time will not be kind to Cameron’s post-Aliens career, that once the effects and spectacle begin showing their age, there won’t be much left worth revisiting. It’s bittersweet to remember how guys like Lucas, Spielberg, and Cameron once entertained audiences of all political persuasions by crafting a shared popular culture that we all enjoyed and took pride in. It was a time when our favorite directors didn’t go on national television to call half of their audience “boneheads” or “swine.” And, perhaps not coincidentally, it was also a time when movies like Aliens — with richly drawn characters, rousing heroism, sparkling humor, and believable, lived-in worlds — came out of Hollywood with something approaching a pleasant regularity.
This concludes our look through a conservative lens at James Cameron and his magnificent space-marine thrill ride Aliens. Come back next week as we study an all-new film from an all-new year, only at Big Hollywood.
Previous posts in the series “James Cameron, Sigourney Weaver, and Aliens“
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
FURTHER READING and VIEWING
You guys might want to wait until October 25 to watch (or re-watch) Aliens. That’s the day when a humongous new Blu-ray set comes out with all the trimmings. The Cameron movie in the set sports the following extras:
1986 Theatrical Version
1991 Special Edition with James Cameron introduction
Audio commentary by director James Cameron, producer Gale Anne Hurd, alien effects creator Stan Winston, visual effects supervisors Robert Skotak and Dennis Skotak, miniature effects supervisor Pat McClung, and actors Michael Biehn, Bill Paxton, Lance Henriksen, Jenette Goldstein, Carrie Henn and Christopher Henn
Final theatrical isolated score by James Horner
Composer’s original isolated score by James Horner
Deleted and extended scenes
MU-TH-UR Mode interactive experience with Weyland-Yutani DatastreamSuperior Firepower: Making ALIENS
* 57 Years Later: Continuing the Story
* Building Better Worlds: From Concept to Construction
* Preparing for Battle: Casting and Characterization
* This Time It’s War: Pinewood Studios, 1985
* The Risk Always Lives: Weapons and Action
* Bug Hunt: Creature Design
* Beauty and the Bitch: Power Loader vs. Queen Alien
* Two Orphans: Sigourney Weaver and Carrie Henn
* The Final Countdown: Music, Editing and Sound
* The Power of Real Tech: Visual Effects
* Aliens Unleashed: Reaction to the FilmPre-Production
Original Treatment by James Cameron
Pre-Visualizations: Multi-Angle Videomatics with Commentary
Storyboard Archive
The Art of Aliens: Image Galleries
Cast Portrait Gallery
Production
Production Image Galleries
Continuity Polaroids
Weapons and Vehicles
Stan Winston’s Workshop
Colonial Marine Helmet Cameras
Video Graphics Gallery
Weyland-Yutani Inquest: Nostromo Dossiers
Pre-Production and Aftermath
Deleted Scene: Burke Cocooned
Deleted Scene Montage
Image Galleries
Special Collector’s Edition LaserDisc Archive
Main Title Exploration
Aliens: Ride at the Speed of Fright
Trailers & TV Spots
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