best james cameron feature film

That's all he's done? Hm. I guess T2. Titanic is certainly a more "epic" and "serious" film, but it was interminable to me.

The Terminator>T2. It's between that and Aliens.

i love aliens, and he definitely made it his own -- it feels like a cameron movie -- but he gets extra points for inventing the terminator. so that.

also, what an odd filmography he has. about to get odder, obv.

Aliens, followed by The Terminator.

terminator 2. wouldn't change a thing.

no aquaman, no credibility

Don't let Harlan Ellison see tipsy's comment or there'll be trouble. Trouble, I tell you.

AVATAR

since his first film in 11 years is about to come out, mebbe shoulda waited?

ellison v. cameron was a real clash of the dickheads.

Aliens.

Has anyone actually seen Piranha II?

I have. The Piranhas can fly.

shouldve called it birds II

Piranha II used to run on Cinemax or something like all the freaking time when I was a kid. It really sullies the memory of the first one.

terminator>aliens>>t2>the abyss>>titanic>>>true lies>>>>>>>>p2

True Lies is fun!

uh, I'm trying to remember what was fun about

http://llamabutchers.mu.nu/archives/jamie%20lee%20curtis%20in%20true%20lies.jpg

Good clean o_O fun. Voted Terminator anyway.

Oh wait - "This is not a movie!!"
That was kinda fun

is that one of the blue guys from avatar xxp

the action shit is good, but the rest is incredibly weak

is that one of the blue guys from avatar xxp

"right from the start i knew Jamie Lee had to have tits..."

T2 lags on the Mexico detour, but the final hour is unfuckwithable.

went with Aliens, which is pretty mega.

Was I a weird kid in that, as big a fan as I was of Aliens and the Terminator movies, I probably watched and enjoyed The Abyss twice as much as the others?

i read the novelization of the abyss :D :D :D

orson scott card iirc

maybe The Abyss is the "smartest"

i haven't seen Piranha 2 tho

the only knock i have against T2 is that it contains neither bill paxton or michael biehn

i voted for true lies because of the scene where arnold fires a missile with a terrorist dangling from it

michael biehn is an axiom of cinema imo

for me it's: Terminator > Abyss > True Lies > T2 > Aliens

i hate unnecessary sequels.

my knock against Aliens is that when you look at it there's only like 10 actual minutes of the marines fighting against the aliens

since his first film in 11 years is about to come out, mebbe shoulda waited?

― Your Favorite Saturday Night Thing (Dr Morbius), Sunday, November 15, 2009 11:11 AM (Yesterday)

Somehow, I don't really think it would've made a difference.

maybe challops, but i voted The Abyss.

The Abyss. By a large ...er...margin.

terminator 2. wouldn't change a thing.

― caek, Sunday, 15 November 2009 16:02 (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

True Lies is vile; it feels more 1984 than The Terminator.

Voted Titanic because for at least 45 minutes, it's something like the best action-adventure movie ever. T2 is the best action-adventure movie for more like about 41 minutes or so.

No, not for even 2 minutes is it like The Wages of Fear.

my knock against Aliens is that when you look at it there's only like 10 actual minutes of the marines fighting against the aliens

Yeah, what a shame it has characterization and story instead of being "a ride" in the permanently approved style.

The Wages of Fear (good, not great) is no more an action classic than Diabolique outdoes Hitchcock.

come on morbius the only reason anybody watches aliens is to watch the marines be badasses xp

"anybody"

you're right tho the movie needs more scenes of ripley and newt being tender and making deep ~connections~ with each other

morbius doesn't watch movies "anybody" watches

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 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.

i didnt realize the Abyss was so hard to see these days. i'm still carting around my special edition dvd from back in the day. i guess that explains why it seems massively underrated in the Cameron canon, an incredibly fun movie

Cameron claims a deluxe Blu-Ray treatment is coming out this year, but he's been saying that for years now. Presume it'll be available streaming in some capacity whenever that sees the light of day.

! 🌊

https://x.com/jimcameron/status/1724111169840124360?s=46&t=bJOqpCuQneT7ju08y55VSA

nice, been meaning to see this

it's such a great movie

Possibly the only Cameron movie where the acting is the best part.

My favorite Cameron film! This is great it's finally remastered

Hope it's not the Director's Cut. OG ending was perfect. Hope they kept that

it’s the special edition

(i prefer the special edition ending in just about every way even tho the frozen tidal wave cgi is a little ehhh)

Kind of funny how many Cameron movies feature someone fighting in a mech suit, if you include the submersible battle here. Both Avatars, Aliens, this, even his short amateur film Xenogenesis.

is it any wonder he eventually adapted an anime

Seriously. Why has Jim wasted so much time exploring the ocean when his heart is clearly set on building a giant mech suit?

I don't think much of either ending but I primarily thinking of The Abyss as a suspense movie - one of the greatest suspense movies ever IMO - so I kind of prefer the shorter run time.

It's been so long since I've seen it, I can't remember the details, but there's a scene where Ed Harris (maybe?) creeps up on Michael Biehn (I think) with a hammer (possibly?) but it's probably the most edge-of-my-seat cinema experience I can rememeber. Once Ed Harris gets to the bottom and survives, all the tension goes out of it.

Iirc it's a wrench. But same idea. Biehn has got the space madness, and he's kind of messing with some chains, and there's that great shot where Ed is being all sneaky-creepy and the camera cuts to Biehn's eyes, and he is being literally *creepy*.

I've never seen Abyss. I should probably remedy that. My favorite of the ones I've seen is the original Terminator, which I rewatched recently. It's great to see how resourceful he could be without a mega-bucks budget.

Saw The Abyss in theaters and loved it. Have never seen it all the way through since but would absolutely buy a Blu-Ray.

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.

saw true lies yesterday, pretty bad but a fun reminder of pre-9/11 action movies but what in god's name is going on with that terrible AI upscaling yikes looks like a goddamn chatgpt movie

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/13/movies/ai-blu-ray-true-lies.html

Cameron has (go figure) been a real asshole when called out for what he approved for True Lies, Aliens and T2's transfers. Apparently they are the worst of them, the first Terminator's upscaling is supposedly more subtle, Abyss transfer is supposed to be OK, no one seems to mind Titanic, etc. Like The Godfather or Lord of the Rings movies, though, frequent meddling has resulted in no definitive edition for any of them.

True Lies was the first major movie to do the "bullet casings tinkling on concrete" sound effect. I'm willing to defend the movie's other transgressions as an attempt at a Verhoeven-esque Bond parody, but that one is unforgivable.