Tag: James Cameron
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Untangling The Terminator Timeline
The Terminator franchise is cooked from a recipe of cyborgs, time travel, bullets, and explosions, seasoned with themes of destiny, paranoia, and technophobia. Subtract or substitute too many of these ingredients and you wind up with something not-Terminator. Terminator Salvation is the first episode to dare to omit the foundational time travel element. Its “present”…
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Terminator Salvation is oppressively feel-bad apocalypse porn
Terminator Salvation was released in a year curiously rife with apocalypse porn. The visions of world’s end in theaters that year varied wildly in tone: everything from illuminating art to alarmism to escapism. The competition to bum you out included Roland Emmerich’s 2012, which utilized the best special effects technology money could buy to ritually…
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This’ll Ruin My Day: James Cameron Goes Down the Digital Rabbit Hole in Avatar
Avatar is the perfect distillation of all of James Cameron’s worst tendencies: an obsession with the marine corps (while trying to have it both ways: worshipping the hardware and lingo, but casting them as villains), embarrassingly heinous dialogue (undercutting every dramatic moment with somebody droning flat one-liners like “oh shit” or “this’ll ruin my day”),…