With the release of Avatar: The way of the water, and its box-office success, writer/director/producer/editor James Cameron has once again proven to be a master of the modern blockbuster. And while Cameron’s films play in other genres, all of his films have an element of visceral, thrilling action. It’s been an essential part of every one of Cameron’s Hollywood hits, from his first outing as a director Piranha II: Spawningto the most recent avatar. Not only is action present in every Cameron film, but the action is routinely fantastic. cameron has been praised as one of the greatest living action directors, and rightly so, as his action sequences always carry a sense of real danger, with fallible characters, all within a carefully curated set piece.
Real danger
If there’s a secret ingredient to the action in James Cameron movies, it’s the sense of real danger for the characters in each movie. While the current dominant action subgenre, superhero movies, often stars nearly indestructible heroes, Cameon’s films contrast with this trend and usually feature characters who are not super-powered and can get hurt. Cameron contrasts this with antagonists who are often much more powerful, seemingly unkillable.
When Cameron’s films feature stronger characters, he will integrate other protagonists who are not only more vulnerable, but vital to the story. When Cameron made Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 heroic Terminator 2: doomsday, 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 extend the action, it still did it while protecting John, putting more at stake.
Cameron’s latest series, avatar, plays with this sense of danger in entirely new ways. In the first entry, Sam Worthington’s Jake Sully can only assume the body of his titular avatar while lying in a tube-like machine. Coupled with the dangerous air on the planet Pandora and Jake’s human body lying defenseless while being a Na’Vi, a secret weakness of the main character begins to hang over him. And lo and behold, the final action sequence takes place just outside the cabin that houses Jake’s human body, lending a greater sense of stake and complexity to a typical hero versus villain showdown. Jake Sully leaves his human body behind at the end of the first Avatar movie, so in the sequel The way of the waterJake and Neytiri’s children are introduced to bring new stakes and a deeper sense of danger to the film’s action.
Mortal characters
This real sense of danger for the heroes is based on the fact that James Cameron is not afraid to kill off his characters, leading the audience to believe that other characters are actually in danger. In his first studio film, The Terminator, time-traveling freedom fighter Kyle Reese sacrifices himself to destroy the T-800, igniting a pipe bomb to seemingly kill them both. But where most action movies would have ended there, and The terminator almost did, the T-800 survives the explosion and begins crawling after Sarah Connor in its skeletal form. Not only does this make the T-800 an iconic, nearly unkillable foe; it therefore allows Sarah Connor to become the film’s true action hero, as she vanquishes and destroys the Terminator.
Cameron uses a similar tactic to elevate a character he didn’t create with Ripley Aliens. Already established as the sole survivor of a Xenomorph, Aliens took Ripley a step further as an action hero. While accompanying the Colonial Marines on a mission to locate and destroy Xenomorphs, Ripley must eventually take command and face the Alien Queen herself. Cameron doesn’t 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 hierarchy of power is pervasive throughout Cameron’s films Terminator 2: doomsdaywhere an even more powerful terminator, the T-1000, is introduced to fight the T-800, now reprogrammed to fight for the humans.
Huge set pieces
The last piece of James Cameron’s action supremacy is simpler than one might think: James Cameron does action BIG. Regardless of the movie, every action sequence Cameron directs always goes beyond audience expectations. Some people forget that following the iconic “I’ll be back” line, the Terminator drives a car through a police station.
There is probably no better example of large-scale action than Titanic. Even as a historical romantic drama, the film’s entire closing act, which runs for well over an hour, is all one giant set piece as the titular ship sinks. This climax converges on all of Cameron’s action pillars, as his leaders are forced to escape the flooding lower decks, away from a weapon-wielding foe, to the top of the ship as it cracks in two, and into the icy waters. below.
While the Titanic production team didn’t replicate the entire ship to scale as planned, Cameron convinced Paramount Pictures to build a 220-foot version of the Titanic, as well as numerous destructible interior sets and a massive water tank. The production crew actually flooded these sets with a mix of stunt doubles and CGI. Titanic went well over budget at the time and became the most expensive film of all time, cause internal panic, but the movie certainly didn’t flop. The Historical Epic became the first movie ever to be dirty a billion dollars.
Regardless of the setting, be it the depths of the ocean or the skies of an alien world, James Cameron’s films will always contain a sense of thrilling, tangible action. With a real sense of danger, with characters that could actually fall prey to that danger, all coupled with gigantic scale, a Cameron action scene provides every reason why the writer/director/producer is so successful.