the terminator | the m0vie blog

New Escapist Column! On How “Avatar: The Way of Water” is an Archetypal James Cameron Movie…

Posted on December 16, 2022 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With the looming release of Avatar: The Way of Water, it seemed like a good time to take a look at Cameron’s aquatic, which might be his most personal and intimate movie ever.

Cameron’s filmography is interesting and varied, working in a number of genres and registers across his career. However, he has a set of familiar preoccupations: water, industrialisation, militarism, environmentalist, parenthood, feminism and so on. However, it’s fascinating that one of the most consistent threads across Cameron’s filmography is an evolving idea of family. Cameron’s epics are often stories of families pulling themselves together in the face of crisis. The Way of Water is no different.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: aliens, aquatic, avatar, avatar: the way of water, family, fatherhood, filmography, found family, james cameron, Movies, the terminator, themes, True Lies | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On “The Terminator” as a Slyly Subversive Slasher…

Posted on August 3, 2020 by Darren

I published a new piece at The Escapist earlier today. I rewatched The Terminator recently, and got thinking about the film as a horror movie rather than a science-fiction film.

The Terminator is often considered a landmark science-fiction film, and understandably so. However, The Terminator also works as a horror movie. It’s a slasher movie about a relentless force chasing a young woman through a nightmarish Los Angeles lit in shades of neon blue and green, so as to evoke a sense of insomnia. However, Cameron does more than just embrace the tropes of the slasher movie. He engages with them, and puts a subtly subversive twist on the standard rules of the genre.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: escapist magazine, horror, james cameron, slasher, the terminator | 1 Comment »

Non-Review Review: The Terminator

Posted on June 14, 2010 by Darren

Wow. What a debut. Okay, I know this wasn’t quite a debut for James Cameron, but Pirhana II hardly counts, right? Terminator is perhaps the best example of a talented young director producing a large-scale action movie on a miniscule budget. I’ll provoke the disdain of many a film buff out there when I declare I have a very slight preference for the sequel Terminator II: Judgement Day, but the first two movies are some of the best examples of action movies from the eighties/nineties. Hell, they are both some of the best examples of any action movies.