With the release ofAvatar: The Way of Water, and its box office success, writer/director/producer/editor James Cameron has once again proven himself a master of the modern blockbuster. And while Cameron’s films do dabble in other genres, all of his movies have an element of visceral, exciting action. It’s an essential part of each ofCameron’s Hollywood hits, from his first directing gig inPiranha II: The Spawning, to the most recentAvatar. Not only is action present in every Cameron film, but the action is routinely fantastic, as well. Cameronhas been laudedas one of the greatest living action directors, and for good reason, as his action sequences always carry a sense of real danger, featuring fallible characters, and all within a meticulously-assembled set piece.
Related:James Cameron Almost Walked Off Aliens
Real Danger
If there’s any secret ingredient to the action in James Cameron movies, it’s the sense of real danger to each movie’s characters. Whereas the current dominant action subgenre, superhero movies, often star near-indestructible heroes, Cameon’s filmscontrast this trend, and will usually feature characters that are not super-powered, and are able to be hurt. Cameron contrasts this with antagonists that are often much more powerful, seemingly unkillable.
When Cameron’s movies do star stronger characters, he will integrate other leads that are not only more vulnerable, but are vitally important to the story. When Cameron made Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 heroic inTerminator 2: Judgment Day, he paired the indestructible android with a 10-year-old John Connor, the future leader of the human resistance against Skynet. So even while the T-800 was able to take the hits and expand the action, he still was doing it while protecting John, which added a higher level of stakes.
Cameron’s latest series,Avatar, plays with this sense of endangerment in all-new ways. In the first entry, Sam Worthington’s Jake Sully can only take on the body of his titular avatar while laying in a tubelike machine. Coupled with the hazardous air on the planet Pandora, and Jake’s human body lying defenseless while he’s a Na’Vi, a secret weakness to the main character begins to hang over him. And lo and behold, the final action scene takes place right outside the shack that houses Jake’s human body, imbuing a typical heroes/villain showdown with a higher sense of stakes and complexity. Jake Sully leaves his human body behind at the end of the first Avatar film, soin the sequel,The Way of Water, Jake and Neytiri’s children are introduced to provide new stakes and a deeper sense of danger to the film’s action.
Mortal Characters
This real sense of danger towards the heroes is grounded by the fact that James Cameron is not afraid to kill off his characters, which elevates the audience’s belief that other characters are in actual jeopardy. In his first studio film, The Terminator, time-traveling freedom fighter Kyle Reese sacrifices himself in order to destroy the T-800, igniting a pipe bomb to seemingly kill them both. But where most action movies would have ended there, andThe Terminatoralmost did, the T-800 survives the explosion, and begins crawling after Sarah Connor in its skeletal form. This not only establishes the T-800 as an iconic, nigh-unkillable foe; it also then allows Sarah Connor to become the true action hero of the movie, as she overcomes the Terminator and destroys it.
Cameron employs a similar tactic to elevate a character he did not create with Ripley inAliens. Already established as the lone survivor of a Xenomorph,Alienstook Ripley one step further as an Action Hero. As she accompanies Colonial Marines on a mission to locate and destroy Xenomorphs, Ripley must eventually assume command and take on the Alien Queen herself. Cameron does not portray the Colonial Marines as weak at all, but he does portray the aliens as more formidable than the marines, with Ripley the most enduring of them all. This sense of a shifting power hierarchy is present throughout Cameron’s films, likeTerminator 2: Judgment Day, where an even more powerful terminator,the T-1000, is introduced to fight the T-800, now reprogrammed to fight for the humans.
Related:Terminator Reboot Discussions Are Happening, Says James Cameron
Huge Set Pieces
The final piece of James Cameron’s action supremacy is more simple than one would think: James Cameron does action BIG. Regardless of the film, each action sequence Cameron directs always expands past the audience’s expectations. Some people forget that following the iconic line “I’ll be back”, the Terminator drives a car through a police station.
There’s likely no better example of large-scale action thanTitanic. Even as a Historical Romantic Drama, the film’s entire final act, clocking in at well over an hour, is all one giant set piece, as the titular ship sinks. This climactic set piece converges on all of Cameron’s action mainstays, as his leads are forced to escape from the flooding lower decks, away from a gun-wielding enemy, to the top of the ship as it cracks in two, and into the freezing water below.
While Titanic’s production team did not replicate the entire ship to scale as planned, Cameron did convince Paramount Pictures to build a 775-foot-long version of the Titanic, as well as numerous destructible interior sets and a massive water tank.The production crewactually flooded these sets, utilizing a mixture of stunt doubles and CGI.Titanicwent well over budget, at the time, becoming the most expensive movie of all time,causing internal panic, but the film certainly did not flop. The Historical Epic became the first movie to ever grossa billion dollars.
Regardless of setting, be it the depths of the ocean or the skies of an alien world, the movies of James Cameron will always feature a sense of thrilling, tangible action. Featuring a true sense of endangerment, with characters actually capable of falling prey to that danger, all coupled with gigantic scale, a Cameron action scene provides all the reason why the Writer/Director/Producer is so successful.
