A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Avatar (2009) Written and directed by James Cameron Starring: Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Zoe Saldana Although writer-director James Cameron didn't exactly vanish into thin air after his 1997 boffo hit  Titanic  earned a roomful of Oscars and a small bank's worth of box office "take," it seemed that the guy had gone off into a Howard Hughes-like state of reclusion, at least artistically speaking. Of course, Cameron did  not  retire to some Pacific Ocean island to sip mai-tais and bask on a sun-soaked beach; he has been quite active making documentaries, producing TV series ( Dark Angel ) and prepping quite a few movie projects, including two sequels to Avatar. His 2009 science-fiction movie,  Avatar, was Cameron's first feature film in 12 years.  Like Titanic , it was very expensive to make ($230 million), partly because Cameron had to develop new computer graphic techniques, and partly because of the ambitious s...

Pros:  Interesting premise, cast performs decently and the special effects are great Cons:  No single dominant villain, too dependent on action sequences After the success of director Jonathan Mostow’s  Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (T3),  a film which depicted the “birth” of the murderous computer network known as Skynet and the nuclear attack it launches against humanity on July 24, 2004 – Judgment Day – many fans of the science-fiction genre figured that the series would continue with more sequels, perhaps focusing on the battle between the survivors of the nuclear holocaust and Skynet’s armies of Terminators and Hunter-Killers. There were, of course, various issues that needed to be addressed, the biggest one being the non-availability of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who stars in the previous three films as the original Terminator and two reprogrammed T-800 Model 101 copies and is the big audience draw for the franchise.  Schwarzenegger had lef...