James Cameron (1) (1954–)

The techs move aside and suddenly John Connor is standing beside him. Connor...their grim messiah...He fixes Reese with an intense gaze. There is so much he wants to say, but cannot bring himself to. Finally Reese speaks.
REESE: Did you know I'd be the one who volunteered?
Connor nods.
CONNOR: I've always known.

There is a man in his forties playing with two small children nearby. He turns. It is John Connor.
SARAH (V.O.): John fights the war differently than it was foretold. Here, on the show more battlefield of the Senate, the weapons are common sense...and hope.

You don't recall those scenes from Terminator 2? That's because they were cut - Terminated - you might say. The face-to-face between Reese and Connor was never filmed but Sarah watching her grandchildren and their father, the Senator, was and this book has the pictures to prove it.

The Judgement Day script went through seven drafts, additions and revisions. Here you can find what ideas never made it to film, what characters were combined and what dialogue was ad-libbed on set. Additionally there are over 500 film stills and storyboards illustrating the facing text, though most are in black-and-white. But what I found particularly interesting were the 'production notes' which detailed the evolution of a scene and often contain the kind of trivia fans love to discover. Question: do you know how many hands the T-1000 has while pursuing the SWAT van in the helicopter? I'll wait why you slo-mo the DVD...

Yes, interesting, huh? I also enjoyed James Cameron's introduction. Like a man who's about to pull back the curtain and show you the goods, he's really candid about the writing process.
"I hate writing. It is the most tedious, solitary, terrifying part of making of a film. It is the moment when the creative die is cast, although it will take months, maybe years, and millions of dollars to find out if the throw was lucky... The problem is that when you're writing, you can't think of that awesome responsibility or you won't ever get a single word down on paper. You have to divorce yourself mentally from the director-self which will be sweating months later under the yoke your writer-self is creating. And to take responsibility for the financial success of a multi-million dollar project at that fragile stage of creation is the death of art... With a kind of abandon, I pre-absolve myself from the responsibility of creating stunts and special effects in the real world, and plunge into the story as if I am writing a novel, rather than a screenplay which is only a means to an end.

So if you are looking for a Terminator fix, or are just a student of story-craft, you might want to give this one a try. show less

A militant corporation is mining an inhabited planet.

I was entertained. The action scenes are done quite well, although they're not especially memorable. The science fiction aspects don't work at all; I think Cameron forgot about a third of the way through writing the script that it wasn't supposed to be a magical fantasy world. And the not-so-subtle racial undertones made me fairly uncomfortable. Of course, it's the special effects that matter for this sort of movie, and they're great. But show more when all is said and done, I have to wonder why, if you're spending $250 million on a movie, you can't be bothered to come up with a story more compelling than a rip-off of Fern Gully.

Concept: D
Story: C
Characters: F
Dialog: C
Pacing: B
Cinematography: B
Special effects/design: A
Acting: B
Music: D

Enjoyment: B

GPA: 2.2/4 show less

I don't give 5 stars to many films. I'm kind of surprised at how much I love this movie, in fact, because I never even bothered to see it when it was in the theatre. After all, I reasoned, while it's goundbreaking in terms of the way it was made -- and even though it's opened up an entirely new way of making a movie, no one's ever said anything good about the story. And isn't that the real reason for making a movie? To tell a story? And Cameron _did_ have a story to tell.

Even though the show more story reminds me greatly of _Dances With Wolves_, it is told beautifully. A man from a different way of life, living in a dystopia, comes to a new place and meets a different people. Unlike his own, these folks live in unity with the land and nature. He learns their ways and comes to love them and their world passionately. At last, however, his own people come and try to destroy the simpler, gentler culture because they have something the dystopians want/need. In the case of the Lakota people of _Dances_, it would ultimately gold. Here, on Pandora, it is "unobtainium."

Remarkably, the addition of the extra few minutes in the Collectors' special edition makes a great movie even better. The added footage shows how bad Earth has become, explains exactly why unobtainium is so highly sought-after (It's not too big a spoiler for me to reveal that it's a room temperature superconductor, something of a "holy grail" to today's scientists), and expands on the link types of critters found on Pandora and the Na'vi's link to them and all of nature. I wish (and hope) that in the ultimate edition, he spends more time letting us get to know the People better, since all but Natiri are one-dimensional. This was one of the strengths in Dances With Wolves -- Costner fleshed out many of his Lakotas, and we grew to love the people individually as well as the culture.

Do I recommend Avatar? You betcha. I've got both releases now, and will spend more money buying the next, ultimate version when it is released in the future (or, to quote Tommy Lee Jones in _Men in Black_, "I guess I'm going to have to buy the White Album all over again."). I'm not anywhere near bored with watching it, and it's going to stay in my DVD player for a while longer. I hope that, if you haven't discovered this great piece of filmmaking for both its story and its ground-breaking techniques. show less

Space marines visit a colony infested by deadly aliens.

There's a lot of action movie cliches and general James Camerony corniness that comes pretty close to wrecking it, but overall it's extremely effective. And it's a lot scarier than I'd remembered it being.

Concept: A
Story: B
Characters: C
Dialog: D
Pacing: A
Cinematography: C
Special effects/design: A
Acting: C
Music: C

Enjoyment: A plus

GPA: 2.9/4

(May 2010)