Aliens, Terminators and Avatars: The James Cameron Sequel

Why Examine This Now? After 13 years, James Cameron will release Avatar 2 on December 16 of this year. When adjusting for inflation, Avatar is the second highest-grossing film of all time behind Gone with the Wind. When not adjusting for inflation, it’s the highest. He is the 5th-highest grossing director of all time, so overlooking his newest project is a mistake. While the box office landscape has largely moved away from directors and movie stars to studio IP and characters (Iron Man is more important than Robert Downey Jr. these days), doubting Cameron’s ability to drive business to the box office and earn strong critical reviews is foolhardy. Whether or not we’re paying any attention to news around this film, Cameron is coming back.

I decided to revisit the other two sequels he made to figure out not just how he constructs a sequel, but to understand what themes he’s interested while he does so. Plus, his two sequels are Aliens and Terminator 2, and I love watching those movies because they kick ass, plain and simple.

Better Special Effects. James Cameron and blockbuster special effects go hand in hand. With a background in engineering, Cameron has been open about liking to make movies that aren’t reliant on special effects but give him a chance to push the envelope in terms of what special effects can do as an integral part of the story.

With Aliens, he uses special effects to enhance the thrill ride of the film and deepen the intensity of the action-horror compared to the purely atmospheric exercise of the original; everything including the scares, alien design, and the sets is bigger, louder, and faster. What surprises me in this film is the practical effects that Cameron relies on, especially in the depiction of the Queen Alien and Ripley having a mech-supported fistfight featuring very little CGI. It’s helped the film age tremendously well by increasing the claustrophobic immediacy of the film’s action throughout the course of the story, but most notably in its middle hour.

Cameron's original idea for the Terminator was a humanoid robot capable of turning his body into liquid metal; between financial constraints on his first film and the technology of the time, he had to change his plans. By 1991, when T2 was released, the special effects had not only caught up with Cameron’s original vision, but he was able to deploy them in such a smart way, alongside very clever practical effects, that they still look great 30 years on. He also spent plenty of time and money on crafting practical car/truck/helicopter chases that make modern audiences’ jaws hit the floor.

When I look ahead to Avatar 2, I’m interested in Cameron not just creating the effects that weren’t available to him in 2009, since it feels like we’ve finally caught up to the spectacle he gave us then, but in how the effects will shape the story. If he’s after a different mood in Avatar 2 like he was in Aliens and T2 – both of whose predecessors are heavier on horror and both of whom are heavier on action – how will the effects play a part in that? With the first one being so heavy on action and spectacle, will he pursue a scary aquatic thrill ride as a contrast to the original’s mood? This certainly isn’t his first time in water bound storytelling.

Evil Becomes Good. The most legendary maestros of popular entertainment – including Spielberg and Cameron – are deeply aware of the expectations an audience brings to their movies and meet the audience where they are. Cameron doesn’t just do that with special effects, but with the story beats. Both T2 and Aliens feature a robot who was originally a villain in the previous film that is revealed to be a good guy this time around, but not until after some tension first. This then provokes a reaction in the previous film’s protagonist, both of whom are women, who must overcome the well-earned bias that they were carrying against these androids. Cameron’s sequels also allow these humans playing androids to flex some more of their acting chops by bonding with the humans they protect.

In Avatar, the bad guys were the capitalistic and militaristic humans attempting to exploit the natural resources of Pandora for their own gain, though the film takes its time in developing that conflict, and with a few key exceptions were all united in this effort. If Cameron were to build in a similar plot mechanism to Avatar 2 that he did in his other sequels, it could take the form of former human soldiers who have regretted their past actions against the Na’vi and need to earn the trust of the main characters and thus forcing them to confront any previous bias they had against the humans. Whatever he decides to do, he knows his audience will enter his latest sequel with a set of expectations that he will usurp as a way of telling a new story and further developing his characters in addition to pulling the rug out from under the audience or generating tension.

Leading Women Grow into Their Own. The legacies of these films don’t stop at the action, or the thrills, or the special effects, or the cheesy-yet-sincere dialogue. Both films are unique in the history of the action movie in their depictions of their female protagonists.

Sigourney Weaver was nominated for an Oscar for her reprisal of Ellen Ripley, who both wields a flamethrower-machine gun combo and is a thoroughly tender surrogate mother for an orphaned child. Like in the first film, every man around her should have listened to her sooner; unlike the first film, some of them do and allow her to flex her charismatic acting chops as she becomes responsible for making plans and inspiring morale in the remaining troops after an initial massacre.

In prepping for T2, Linda Hamilton went through intense physical training to shape her body into as much of a killing machine as any Terminator. This physicality surpassed anything that Sigourney Weaver was doing in Aliens and was years ahead of its time in its depiction of a female action hero. This wasn’t just a revelation for audiences in 1991 but was an excellent physical transformation to match the emotional transformation that Sarah Connor had undergone in the years between the two movies.

Slipping back into prediction mode, I wouldn’t be surprised if Neytiri is given a lot more agency and development this time around; while she was fierce, compassionate, and a strong character the first time around, by framing the story through Jake Sully’s point of view, she essentially represents everything that’s wonderful and free about her tribe, as opposed to being a three-dimensional character. Something that T2 and Aliens both brought out in their leading ladies, that further colored the stories, was their motherhood; Sarah Connor is finally reunited with her son and fights to protect him, while Ellen Ripley essentially adopts Newt over the course of the story. Perhaps Neytiri and Jake will have a child of their own to further develop them as characters this time and change the stakes, as Neytiri has already been established as a warrior, which wasn’t true for Ripley and Sarah Connor in their first films but became a huge part of their second.

Changing the Stakes. Every sequel needs to increase or amplify its stakes if it wants to be superior to the original; it’s an integral part of the sequel’s existence – why are we continuing this story? What’s new?

The way that Cameron adjusted the stakes for Aliens defies the classical notion that a sequel’s stakes always need to be bigger; in some instances, they are but in others they’re even smaller. The stakes of the first film are very small, in the tradition of slasher films: our small band of characters will attempt to defeat or evade the monster stalking them before they’re all killed. At the end of that movie, Ripley defeats the single Xenomorph that had managed to kill all the rest of her crew, but that was that. For Aliens, the threat grew in the form of hundreds of aliens compared to just one, but the introduction of the queen alien and the idea that the entire Xenomorph class of creature could be destroyed increases the stakes from our onscreen group of characters to the threat that they pose to mankind. However, the most intense emotional stakes surround Newt, who is only one small person. This intimate and emotional threat wasn’t present in the first one, as we only got so attached to the characters before they started getting dispatched. I genuinely think Aliens is one of the smartest ways to both multiply and amplify the stakes in a blockbuster sequel that I’ve seen.

For the first hour of T2, we’re treated to the same gunman vs. gunman stakes that make up the first film, but in the second hour when they decide to attack Skynet, the stakes become preventing the coming annihilation of humanity. While I have slight qualms with how that shift is handled, it’s not unearned given that even the first film is based around the idea of these events coming to pass. Rather than introduce entirely new stakes, or completely re-shape them, Cameron decided to reframe and expand the stakes that were already present in the narrative of the first film, which is a savvy move.

I’m interested to see how James Cameron re-shapes the stakes for Avatar 2, given that the first one was a fight for the ecological survival of the entire planet, since all of Pandora’s natural energy flowed from one source. Perhaps some kind of ticking clock where our characters must find a new natural energy source, in addition to smaller, more character-bound stakes? Could be intriguing.

Capitalism, Greed, and Technology. Cameron’s most major films all wrap entertainment around interrogating a similar central question: what technology will man’s pursuit of wealth create, and what happens when that technology fails us? Think of the owner of the Titanic wanting to go faster, or the “company” prioritizing recovery of the alien life form over the lives of its employees in both films, or Skynet creating the Terminator technology and triggering the end of the world in both films.

As pervasive as these themes were in Cameron’s earlier works, it was plastered all over the first Avatar. Rather than dealing strictly with the implications of man’s technological ambitions resulting in machines that will cause death, he was much more concerned with an analogue for the ecological havoc that corporations wreak in their pursuit of wealth. I don’t really see how this theme could be twisted or improved since it was so clearly and thoroughly explored in the first one. Maybe humans won’t even be involved in the second one? Guess we’ll all find out on December 16th.

The Cameron Signature. Beyond what I’ve outlined here in terms of what Cameron is interested in when he makes a sequel or tells a story or throws himself into the foray of special effects, there are a few other key elements to keep an eye out for to remind yourself that you’re watching a James Cameron movie. He had a strained relationship with his father, so keep an eye out for that, or see if the father is present at all; despite this, the characters will usually form a found family consisting of a mother and father figure, along with a child; however, the “new father” will either be incapacitated or killed, leaving the “new mother” to defeat the evil on her own, which she invariably will.

I’m not sure if identifying these recurring motifs and visual signatures has me deconstructing Cameron’s stories to the point where they feel devoid of heart and are engineered to create broad entertaining appeal. What I’m landing on is that Cameron just deeply understands conventional entertainment storytelling – none of this stuff is as complex as something like Phantom Thread – and has themes that he loves to put on the screen, and that’s that. It’s fascinating that he hasn’t made a movie in 13 years, and in that time franchise storytelling has become dominant at the box office; when he left, he proved that it was possible for a person to write and direct not just a blockbuster, but the highest-grossing film of all time. Let’s see if he can do it again in this vastly different box office landscape.