Looking for a list of the best James Cameron films of his entire career? We have a list of the top 9 best films. “Never bet against James Cameron” has been common wisdom in the film industry and the adjacent world of film criticism for at least 25 years. It started around 1997, when Titanic was delayed for six months and its budget ballooned to enormous proportions. A vanity project from an auteur director with a crazy budget? It was immediately predicted to be a box office disaster that could sink two major studios.
Instead, the film became the biggest box office success of all time and held that title for 12 years until it was surpassed by Avatar, another Cameron film that was expected to flop, but instead reached almost unprecedented financial heights. Titanic also won 11 Oscars, the most in history, including Best Picture and Best Director. From that point on, the idea that this man had a seemingly uncanny commercial and creative sense, as well as his truly visionary approach to making epic films, took hold in the pop culture zeitgeist and has remained there ever since.
It's a little odd, however, that after 40 years in filmmaking—his first official directorial effort, Piranha II: The Spawning, came out in 1982—Cameron has only directed nine feature films, although he has produced and directed others, as well as directing documentaries. TV movies and pilots. But with the exception of his debut, almost every one of his films has been a watershed moment of some sort—on a storytelling, technological, or cultural level. In the field of science fiction in particular, he created films that are considered milestones.
That doesn't mean Cameron doesn't have weaknesses and blind spots. While his films are often visual and technological marvels, many were less impressive in terms of plot, originality and character. Now that he's returning to screens for the first time in 13 years with Avatar: The Way of Water, it's time to take a fresh look at and appreciate Cameron's 40 years of filmmaking experience.
Here is a list of the best James Cameron films:
9. Piranhas 2: Spawn (1982)
James Cameron famously worked as a special effects designer and artist for legendary B-movie producer Roger Corman when he received his first commission as a director to create the sequel to the 1978 cult classic Piranha. But according to multiple reports and Cameron himself (in an archived interview with the Los Angeles Times), he was fired after two and a half weeks by Italian producer Ovidio G. Assonitis, who himself helmed the project. As a result, Cameron dropped the film from his resume, telling the Times: "I've directed, but I don't feel like it was my first film."
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As a result, it's hard to evaluate Piranha II—one of those legendarily bad films with a six percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and an infamous plot point in which the title creatures fly—in the broader context of Cameron's subsequent work. But this experience, along with his work at Corman's film factory, certainly gave him the kind of practical education that would likely be useful to any aspiring director. In the end, Piranha II is as significant as all of Cameron's other works: It gave him his first directorial credit and was a crucial stepping stone to his first proper film. But more on that later.
8. True Lies (1994)
After the massive 1991 blockbuster Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Cameron turned to the spy genre with a loose remake of the 1991 French comedy Sweepstakes!, in which an international spy pretends to be an ordinary businessman, hiding his true career from his family. In Cameron's version, Arnold Schwarzenegger (in his third collaboration with the director) plays Harry Tasker, who poses as a computer salesman to his wife Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis) and daughter Dana (Eliza Dushku), going on missions around the world to win brutal terrorists.
Without the sci-fi trappings that his films often elevate, True Lies is a collection of Cameron's shortcomings as a director: he's loud, his humor is boorish, his characters are thin, and his attitudes toward women and foreigners are sexist and xenophobic, respectively. Cameron's idiosyncratic Middle Eastern terrorists sparked a still-ongoing debate about the portrayal of Arabs and Muslims in Hollywood, and Harry's deception and treatment of his wife (culminating in her being forced to perform a striptease for him, not knowing it was her husband) critics called misogynistic.
The action, special effects and acting are all top notch, so the film is not without significant entertainment value (and it became a major hit, although the proposed sequel never saw the light of day). However, in our opinion, this film remains the "smallest" of Cameron's big films, lacking the vision that drove so many others.
7. Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)
It's hard to rank this movie since it's just been released and it could very well move up or down in the rankings over time. But for now, The Way of Water, despite some of the most stunning CG work in all of film history and a commitment to world-building that borders on obsessive, ranks fairly low on the list thanks to its lack of compelling plot and characters.
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The Way of Water doesn't even have the narrative momentum of its highly derivative predecessor. The first hour of the film is a lot of haphazard set pieces that seem to gloss over entire plot elements, while the second is an increasingly boring montage of one visual effects scene after another. Finally, in the third hour, all this classic Cameron action builds to a crescendo of audio and visual pyrotechnics, leaving us not so much with a satisfying ending as with the impression that it was all supposed to lead to something else.
The 48fps technique that Cameron used, like Peter Jackson and Ang Lee before him, also detracts from other really great visual work. However, anyone with even the slightest interest in this movie should watch it on the big screen with all the bells and whistles; he deserves it now.
6 Avatar (2009)
Make no mistake: Avatar is one of the few films that has earned the "game-changer" label for its innovative visual effects and surprisingly immersive use of 3D, a technique that had previously been almost entirely relegated to the dustbin of film history as a curiosity. Cameron's stunning creation of the alien world of Pandora and its inhabitants was completely unique and detailed, surpassing anything done in the same vein before or since.
But where Avatar, like its sequel, fails is in the plot and characters, which shamelessly borrow from Pocahontas, Dances with Wolves and other well-known stories about a white savior coming to save the indigenous primitives from encroachments of their technologically advanced people. While in some ways this message and Cameron's accompanying environmental themes are even more relevant now, in a world that corporations are doing their best to pave over, his approach is heavy-handed and characters led by a wooden Sam Worthington and a cartoonish Stephen Lang , do not cope with the task.
However, there are moments and ideas that shine. For example, we would like him to explore more deeply the idea that Pandora is herself a living, sentient being; and the scope of the cinematography and action is often breathtaking. And while watching the movie on the small screen is more visually taxing (it hasn't held up very well on television), the recent remastered re-release has been much more impressive to us than the first time around.
5. Titanic (1997)
We'd like to split the first 90 minutes and the second 90 minutes (roughly speaking) of Titanic because Cameron's historical epic suffers from the cinematic version of dissociative identity disorder. On the one hand, his detailed recreation of the unspeakably tragic 1912 sinking of the supposedly "unsinkable" ship RMS Titanic is filled with one sequence of harrowing tension and horror after another, as the various classes of people on the ship meet their fate in often unimaginably sad ways.
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On the other hand, the iceberg takes over an hour to even meet the ship, leaving us with a completely fictional romance between Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, in which a privileged girl and his lower decks rogue fall in love despite an expected engagement to a mustachioed man. Billy Zane. While Winslet and DiCaprio (in their starring roles) are very entertaining, this weak Romeo and Juliet storyline is not.
However, once the ship's fate is sealed, Titanic becomes incredibly exciting, and Leo's abrupt turn from struggling artist to (albeit doomed) action hero is believable. Cameron's direction in the second half of the film is flawless, the visual effects are impeccable and astounding, and the old-fashioned studio polish of the entire film becomes part of its greatness. Even the love story becomes more moving in the context of the chaos and cataclysm surrounding the lovers.
4. Abyss (1989)
The Abyss was initially seen as the first failure of Cameron's career, and perhaps deservedly so. The film was not a hit at the box office, earning just under $90 million worldwide (on a budget of $45 or $70 million, depending on the source). Critics weren't impressed either, although reviews weren't entirely negative at the time. Most reviewers perceived the film, an underwater adventure in which the crew of a deep-sea drilling platform and a team of Navy SEAL divers (led by a psychotic Michael Biehn) try to determine the cause of the sinking of a nuclear submarine in a deep underwater trench, as a solid high-tech thriller with an incomprehensible, out-of-nowhere ending , which features a huge alien ship.
But that's because most critics saw the theatrical cut of the film, for which Cameron was forced by 20th Century Fox to remove 28 minutes of the film, including a key scene at the end in which the aliens living in the trench threaten to destroy humanity if they don't stop trying. destroy yourself. While we remember liking the original version as an exciting, tense film with great effects and acting (despite the usual Cameron archetypes replacing real-life characters), the "special edition" is much better, giving more depth to the film's themes, alien presence and many of the characters .
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The Abyss is one of Cameron's most personal films, as well as one of his most revolutionary: It marked the director's first time working with CGI, creating a pseudopod alien and (for the special edition) a massive tidal wave. This sign of things to come is just one of the many reasons why The Abyss, a film that was misunderstood and then embraced, ranks just below Cameron's holy trinity.
3. Terminator (1984)
This is where it all started for Cameron, with his second official directorial effort (but the first that was truly all his) and a film that became not only one of the signature action/sci-fi thrillers of the 1980s, but also a classic of the genre. This simple story of a cybernetic assassin from the future sent back in time to kill the mother of humanity's would-be savior exhibited some of the director's early themes and stylistic touches—humanity versus technology, relentless pace and action, visceral violence.
The film also marked the beginning of Cameron's many years of collaborations with Lance Henriksen, Michael Biehn and, of course, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was just trying to establish himself as an actor when this film came along and made him a star. And while Linda Hamilton's role was more or less a damsel in distress for most of the film, the subsequent evolution of her character, coupled with Cameron's next film, brought to life the idea of women as action heroes long before Hollywood was generally ready for it.
The Terminator also marked the beginning of Cameron's sometimes derivative approach to storytelling, with legendary science fiction writer Harlan Ellison threatening him with legal action for borrowing elements from the Outer Limits episode "Soldier" (the case was settled out of court). But hey, everyone borrows from somewhere. Whatever its genesis, The Terminator remains a lean, tense, suspenseful and even chilling thriller with impeccable casting, inventive low-budget production and a directorial energy that's impossible to resist.
2. Aliens (1986)
It's quite difficult to make a sequel to an acclaimed masterpiece, but James Cameron, surprisingly, did it twice. In the first case - his first film for a major Hollywood studio (Fox) - he did it by completely changing the genre. Largely abandoning the haunted house and horror trappings of Ridley Scott's original Alien (1979), Cameron turned the sequel into a thrilling Marines vs. Monsters story featuring the ragtag group of charismatic soldiers one might see and love in traditional war films.
The host was Sigourney Weaver, the sole survivor of Alien, returning to her breakout role as Ripley and (at least temporarily) breaking the Hollywood taboo on female action heroes with a performance that remains one of the few in science fiction to be nominated for an Oscar " She was also surrounded by one of Cameron's best casts. Even though his space marines were archetypes rather than characters, people like the unforgettable Bill Paxton, Michael Behan, Jenette Goldstein and Al Williams gave them personality, humanity and humor.
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Working on a relatively small budget of $18 million, Cameron created a gripping, tense, and strangely intimate tale of horror, heroism, and battle that has become one of the greatest sci-fi blockbusters of all time. While we prefer the more compact theatrical cut to the extended edition, we still wish Cameron kept the scene in which Ripley finds out about his daughter's fate in the first cut; she serves as the motive for her subsequent rescue of young alien attack victim Newt (Carrie Henn), giving the film a whole lot of thematic and emotional resonance.
However, Aliens is a near-perfect film, and while there is still some debate as to whether it is better than its predecessor, its place in film history is assured.
1. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
We debated whether this film or Aliens was Cameron's best film, and ultimately decided to go with a film based on his own vision rather than a sequel to someone else's work (which is not to take anything away from Aliens). Terminator 2 has been accused of being just a bigger, louder remake of the original, but that's not the case. Instead, it's an expansion of the ideas and scope of the first film, with Cameron working with a budget that allowed him to fully realize his vision (though perhaps raising the standard of epic cinema too high in the process).
Turning the original film's villain into a hero is a brilliant idea, with Schwarzenegger still playing to his strengths as the emotionless cyborg T-800 who eventually gains a modicum of human feeling through a father-son relationship with the future savior he swore to protect, John Connor (Edward Furlong). The latter is a whiny child rather than a noble teenage messiah, which also plays against type, while his mother Sarah (Linda Hamilton) balances conspiracy theorist paranoia, motherly love and badass fighting moves in one of Cameron's most unique heroines.
And, of course, there's the T-1000 (Robert Patrick in his breakout role), the liquid metal werewolf sent back to kill John Connor, whose lightweight frame seems ill-suited to big, bad Arnold, but instead he proves even more unapologetic and scarier than the Terminator from the original film. The use of CG to create large portions of a character's on-screen appearance was, and remains, a breakthrough in film history that Steven Spielberg would expand on just two years later with Jurassic Park. The advancement of technology in both films changed the course of cinema for better or worse, but 30 years later it remains undeniably effective.
With its groundbreaking effects, a dazzling sequence of chases and action sequences, some of the best characters Cameron and his actors have ever created, and a story so satisfying and complete that the Terminator franchise tried unsuccessfully to continue it for a long time (even Cameron himself failed to follow through on Terminator: Dark Fate, which he was heavily involved in developing), Terminator 2: Judgment Day remains the perfect fusion of all these elements and Cameron at the peak of his powers.
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