James Cameron’s Kitschy New Age Epic

By John David Ebert

I keep waiting for those “Wow!” experiences in film that I used to encounter routinely as a child growing up in the middle American suburbs of the 1980s. It seemed that every summer, I would go to the movies and walk away feeling that I had been temporarily transplanted into another world: there was Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, for example, or David Cronenberg’s version of the The Dead Zone (both major improvements upon Stephen King’s novels); I remember the summer when Spielberg hit me over the head with not just one, but two films: E.T. and Poltergeist, and in the same summer, John Carpenter’s The Thing, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. These were all films of the early 1980s, but as I went into high school, I remember seeing James Cameron’s sequel to Ridley Scott’s masterpiece Alien, itself a sort of sci-fi masterpiece made with an exhilaration and a love of the genre that is rare nowadays. In the 1990s, Cameron wowed me a couple of more times with Terminator 2 and Titanic. After that, he quit making movies. I’m not sure why: maybe those three or four films were enough to prove that he could rival Spielberg and Lucas, and maybe after winning the Oscar for Best Picture for Titanic, he’d decided that his yearnings as an artist, a major director of Hollywood cinema, had been recognized and that was that. Why make any more movies? Read the rest of this entry »