Let me state this up front: sometimes having a screamingly evil villain works just fine. It's just that it doesn't always work, and James Cameron has a tendency to stock his movies with the cardboardiest of cardboard cutouts on the antagonist side.

On a list of Cameron's movies that function surprisingly well on the villain side, I would mark down the two Terminator movies and Aliens. Other movies, like The Abyss or True Lies, have villains that are symptomatic of larger problems in the storyline. I would say that Aliens' Burke is probably still the best villain in a James Cameron film, and, ironically, he operates against a backdrop of sheer otherworldly malice. He's not the biggest villain of the piece, but he's the one who gets the most interesting things to do.

Before I get to a survey of Cameron's various movies, I'll say a few general words about Avatar, the hyped object of the moment. I dunno, I'm pretty torn on this one. I get the feeling that James Cameron is engaged in a rather serious game of "Top that, suckers!" but he seems to be taunting himself more than anyone else. The sheer amount of effort that goes into a movie, at least one that costs as much as Avatar did, is astounding to me. Huge budgets or tiny budgets, it's what you do with the money that matters, and my impression is that the record-busting amounts of money don't make it easier to focus on, say, story or compelling characterization.

With this much money and this much hype, Avatar is supposed to be one of those vaunted generation-defining events that Hollywood is always looking for . . . and I was left almost completely cold by the movie. There seemed to be about 90 minutes of good material struggling to get out of a much longer movie bogged down in its own self-important message and unbalanced use of special effects.

On the other hand, I'll usually take whatever I can get in terms of science fiction epics onscreen, and this one is the biggest. Cameron's had lots of practice in one-upmanship, and you get what you pay for (most reliably on the visual side). Interestingly, I just re-watched Titanic and that movie, while flawed in its own way, holds up far better than I remembered (see below). Maybe I need to wait a decade or so for my odd brain to give Avatar a fair chance!

Early B-Movies

I had always known that James Cameron got his start with the B-movie institution known as Roger Corman. This seemed like an honorable thing to me—working fast and cheap, and doing whatever you can to push the audience's "entertain me" button with almost nothing in the way of resources.

So I went back and watched some of this old material, and while I still would say it was an honorable entry into the movie-making craft for Cameron, I don't think I'll ever watch any of them again. I'll reiterate that I have nothing against B-movies per se; in this particular case, I kept saying to myself, "This movie isn't as good as Aliens!" A completely unfair comparison of course, since not many movies make that grade.

Cameron was the art director for Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) and the production designer for Galaxy of Terror (1981), getting his start on the special effects side. Both movies are terrible. John Sayles, another graduate of the school of Corman, wrote the script for Battle Beyond the Stars, but I don't see that much of Sayles in it. As for the special effects, they're fine, for the time they were done. That's one bar that Cameron has continually raised, but again, that's an endless treadmill that I don't find particularly fascinating in its own right. Cameron broke into "directing" with Piranha 2: The Spawning (1981), and I use scare quotes because the movie is an absolute mess. The first Piranha, directed by Joe Dante just a few years before, is much more of a functional diversion.

I don't have much to say about the antagonists in this early batch of movies, since Cameron was not the writer or director in most of these cases, and also since the movies are so unwatchable that there's not much to say.

The Terminator/Terminator 2

The terminator units in these two movies are the essence of the action movie antagonist, and the clichés actually make sense here. The villain won't stop, has scary abilities, and will definitely crush the life out of you.

In that sense, I don't have much to say about the two Terminator movies. Cameron seems to have an uncanny grasp of how to use an antagonist that has no interesting features whatsoever (apart from the whole "being unstoppable" thing). The terminators have no inner life, no disappointments in middle age, and so forth, but they make for a hell of a roller coaster ride when thrown into a movie.

So the movies are carried almost exclusively by the protagonists, and in this regard I think the first movie has an edge. Sarah Connor, in her first outing, feels more like a real person, and the love affair between her and the man from the future has a "one crazy night" vibe to it that is actually convincing. In the second movie, she has to amp up her action-movie stats to keep up with the amped up action around her. Again, this is not all that necessary for the movie to function as an impressive bit of hardware in the action-movie arms race, but it shows how the nature of the villain can diminish or dehumanize the side we're supposed to be cheering for. That Sarah Connor's transformation is part of the point of the movie, and part of how Cameron tries to make the movie work, doesn't change that fact.

Aliens

James Cameron takes the suspense/horror of the first Alien movie and transforms it into an action thing. This time it's war—indeed! It's a small-scale war for all that, however, with a cast you can count on two hands. And you don't have to count very high as the casualties mount.

In Aliens, the alien species is like the terminator dressed up in different clothes, at least in terms of the plot function. Part of what makes the film so memorable is the character of Burke, played by Paul Reiser as the worst sort of corporate slime. Our heroes are in a dangerous situation, and Burke will gladly sell them out for a few bucks. As usual for a Cameron film, the theme is pretty baldly stated: in a famous line, Ripley says to Burke of his actions in comparison to the aliens munching their way towards them, "I don't know which one of us is worse."

Burke is not particularly subtle either, really, but like the terminators, he knows how to contribute to a movie scene like nobody's business. I think the scene where Ripley and Newt go to sleep in the med lab might be one of my favorites in SF cinema. It's supposed to be safe behind human lines, but Burke's playing the angles, even though it should be incredibly obvious that the situation is blown to hell. Burke: slime and loving it. He's a cog in the gears of the anti-corporate theme, yet still it works.

The Abyss/True Lies

In The Abyss, we get what now looks like James Cameron's early run at the cheeseball environmental/SF epic. We have a meticulously recreated environment (an undersea habitat in this case vs. Pandora, the moon visited in Avatar), a group of working stiffs who get caught in the crossfire (undersea drillers vs. interstellar scientists), and so on. In both cases, the villain of the piece is a military man. In The Abyss, it's Lt. Coffey, whose mission is about as impossible as HAL's, and what's more, he falls prey to pressure-induced mental problems.

Coffey is mostly workable as a character and as a villain, but the flaws of the movie are reflected in the flaws of his characterization. I guess I should define what I mean by "cheeseball environmental epic": there's a message, hammered home rather heavily; the details of the setting are rendered in great detail; and the characters suffer as a result. The combination of these last two is a strange one. I think The Abyss comes off better in this regard compared to Avatar, but that might be because the people and the setting are human and recognizable (Pandora, as I see it, represents much more of a trap or black hole for Cameron's perfectionist tendencies). Coffey tries really hard to make an impression, in other words, but he essentially gets shuffled to the side.

True Lies is a very minor movie, a pretty routine outing, with Arnold as the wisecracking spy, Tia Carrere as the wannabe femme fatale, and a bizarre role for Jamie Lee Curtis as the wife ignorant of her husband's black-ops life. The villains are all Arab terrorists—I remember there being quite a flap at the time about the stereotyping on display. But how else could it be? The villain fits the mode of the rest of the movie perfectly. Mindless action, lame double entendre, the whole bit.

Titanic

I re-watched Titanic over the holidays, and I'm surprised to report that the movie actually holds up. If you haven't watched Titanic since its glory days a dozen years ago, you might want to take the time for a revisit. It's a canny movie, and some distance from the "I'm the king of the world!" hype-a-thon has revealed some different angles to the enterprise.

Famously, Kate Winslet's Rose finds much more romance with Jack, the carefree poor boy, than with her rich fiancé—all this aboard the disastrous maiden voyage of the Titanic. Cal Hockley, the spurned fiancé, is about the worst character sketch of sneering villain imaginable. He functions as a slap in the face to the audience: the THEME is about arrogant rich people, and don't you dare miss it.

Bizarrely, Cal Hockley works. It kind of reminds me of Captain Hammer in Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. I remember Nathan Fillion talking about how he was asked to ham it up more than he was doing, and I imagine the stage direction to Billy Zane was much the same. Sneer more! Chew the scenery! You are the dictionary definition of a cad—act the part! And remarkably, the movie absorbs it.

I must say, though, that in my recent re-watch of the movie, the famous romance didn't make much of an impression on me. It's the ship itself and its ill-fated voyage, and the loving recreation of the same that struck me. The mechanics of it all, the tension, the exquisite doom, the rich and the mighty struck down, and on and on. That Cameron could squeeze in a romance and sell tickets on that basis is like the biggest joke with a cherry on top.

Avatar

So we come back around to Avatar. With regards to the villains of the movie, we have two: a company man named Parker Selfridge (whose name I had to look up—never a good sign if you wanted a memorable character) who functions as the palest shadow of Burke, and a military man named Col. Quaritch. They are the respective corporate and mercenary wings of an effort to mine a valuable mineral from the moon Pandora. Pandora, unfortunately, familiarly, is already inhabited, and the natives haven't been consulted about the plan to blow up their environment and make money from their natural resources.

The problem is that neither Selfridge nor Quaritch are given anything to do. Yes, Quaritch sneers a lot and orders a big invasion, but for all the impression he makes as a convincing or effective character he may as well be Hockley v2.0. The comparison is instructive, since there really isn't much difference between the two, but somehow Hockley works and Quaritch falls flat. I'm not sure why. It certainly seems as if the villainous behavior in Avatar might be convincing and/or thrilling to a large number of other people. Maybe all the movie needs is the bare minimum of an antagonist.

I really don't have much to add to the mountain of words already written about this particular juggernaut. I can see clearly the roots of Avatar in Cameron's career—something like two parts The Abyss to one part Aliens and one part Titanic—but it's not the career-topper I was looking for from Cameron. Maybe the next outing will be!