James Cameron names his favourite sci-fi movies of all time
Cinema, let alone science fiction, would look a lot different without the influence of such movies as The Terminator, Aliens and Avatar, a trio of genre game-changers from American director James Cameron that changed how contemporary audiences appreciated cinema. Indeed, only the likes of Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve are able to knock on the door of Cameron’s mastery.
Rising to fame in the early 1980s with the release of the Arnold Schwarzenegger action vehicle The Terminator, a wild sci-fi flick that perfectly embodied the commercialism of 1980s cinema, Cameron went on to dominate the decade with the cosmic sequel Aliens and the aquatic horror flick The Abyss. Always careful in picking his projects, despite the pace of the decade, Cameron kept his films to a minimum.
Still, he kept up his sci-fi efforts in the following decades, releasing the classic sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day in 1991 and the cinematic game-changer Avatar in 2009, a film that went on to earn $2.9billion, instantly becoming the highest-grossing movie of all time.
So, which are the movies of the genre that the sci-fi master looks up to? We’ve looked back at the director’s favourite films of all time to reveal his very favourites that deal with space adventures, rogue androids and death rays.
Included on the list is the extra-terrestrial horror flick Alien, helmed by Ridley Scott, a movie that Cameron would make a sequel to in 1986. Starring Sigourney Weaver and John Hurt, the sci-fi film tells the story of a lone spaceship which responds to a distress signal only to let an unknown organism onboard.
“The franchise has kind of wandered all over the map,” Cameron told Vulture in 2017: “Ridley [Scott] did the first film, and he inspired an entire generation of filmmakers and science-fiction fans with that one movie, and there have been so many films that stylistically have derived from it, including my own Aliens, which was the legitimate sequel and, I think, the proper heir to his film. I sort of did it as a fanboy. I wanted to honour his film but also say what I needed to say”.
As well as some more predictable sci-fi flicks such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner and Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, Cameron also mentions a few unexpected pleasures, including Christopher Nolan’s 2010 epic Inception and the video game adaptation Resident Evil in 2002.
“One of my guilty-pleasure films that I actually think is quite beautifully made is Resident Evil,” he stated in an interview, “Watching Michelle Rodriguez in that film, moving like this feral creature, is joyful”. Starring Milla Jovovich, the movie, based on the video game series created by Shinji Mikami, tells the story of a military unit that is forced to battle against hordes of infected beasts and humans.
Take a list at Cameron’s full list of sci-fi favourites below.
James Cameron’s favourite sci-fi movies:
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
- Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)
- Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
- Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1976)
- Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)
- Resident Evil (Paul W. S. Anderson, 2002)
- Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (George Lucas, 1977)
