My favorite James Cameron produced work isn't even one of his movies. It's Dark Angel. It may have lost a lot of viewers at the start of the second season, but I still enjoyed both and wish it had a season or two more to truly wrap up the story.
If we could wash away the mess that was Avatar, there's not really a James Cameron directed movie that wasn't at least 'Good bordering Great'.
John Carpenter has some that are borderline 'B' movie mixed in with his greats.
A better comparison might be Ridley Scott vs. James Cameron. A lot of that is going to depend on how Prometheus fleshes out. Unless he bombs on the sequel(s), I think the future will be a lot kinder to Prometheus than the present.
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And now that I think of it. Star Wars (IV) is similar to Avatar in that aspect. But then again I think Star Wars is a bit overrated.
Avatar wasn't supposed to be a deep movie, it was supposed to be a visual spectacle for the time. From that standpoint (if you watched it in 3D/Imax and don't hate 3D) I think it succeeded. Other than that, it isn't a movie I would watch repeatedly.
This.
Cameron started maximizing formulaic mainstream appeal a while back with Titanic, and Avatar was the culmination of that
...both breaking all budget and box office sales records and vindicating his choices to do so.
I really don't think Avatar was that bad of a movie. It was very unoriginal coming from James Cameron. But it was entertaining and I'm pretty sure he wasn't trying to make the story any deeper or more complicated than what it needed to be.
He wanted a story that everyone could grasp to make it entertaining for people of all ages.
I greatly appreciate originality but I don't really think is fair to denigrate a movie just because it's unoriginal. It's actually really hard to come up with something that hasn't been done before let alone do it right. And even if you do people will still accuse you of ripping them off like Harlan Ellison did (which was complete bullshit BTW).
Even great masterpieces like Star Wars are far from being completely original. Some people just need to learn how to enjoy a movie.
And now that I think of it. Star Wars (IV) is similar to Avatar in that aspect. But then again I think Star Wars is a bit overrated.
Well, people seem to think Aliens is great...it really wasn't. It was a rather stupid movie overall, especially compared to the very great first film in the series.
Cameron has a lot of very, very good movies, and a whole lot of stupid movies. FWiW, Titanic is a very very good movie, even though I don't really like it. I like Aliens, even though it is pretty stupid....but it's decent enough.
As for Avatar--I hate 3D with unbridled fury and wish for it to die violently, but I enjoyed the one-time experience of watching that in the theater, in 3D. It was a phenomenal technical achievement, but that movie was nothing more than a tech demo. It was, indeed, a pretty terrible movie on its own...but it was entertaining enough and worth the 1 off experience (just as Star Wars IV was an outright terrible movie, but I love it nonetheless).
James Cameron doesn't set out to make bad, low-production movies: he makes fun, sometimes very good, but always rather expensive movies with serious production value. Sometimes they turn out not so great. With Carpenter, he knows exactly what he is going to give you, and delivers. He aims for mostly B-level nostalgia, and he never fails.
My avatar is my answer.
I liked Aliens a lot, it just was very different, and not nearly as good as Alien.
Alien: Horror (real horror--not this fake startle gore shit that the mouthbreathers seem to like these days)
Aliens: action/sci-fi. It suffers a bit from "timeliness": it's pretty obvious that this is a product of the 80s action genre of the day: the silly humor, the one-liners, the very good action sequences. Cameron is great at this, of course. I'm not implying anything negative about that.
Alien is more or less timeless.