The “beautiful” movie James Cameron admits “didn’t add up logically”
The director of Piranha II: The Spawning becoming one of the most important, influential, and successful filmmakers in the history of cinema couldn’t have been on anybody’s bingo card in the early 1980s, but James Cameron has made a career out of defying expectations.
The Terminator shot him to prominence before he boldly decided to mount a sequel to one of the greatest sci-fi movies ever made, only for Aliens to prove every bit the equal of its predecessor. The Abyss cracked the door open for advancing VFX technology before Terminator 2: Judgement Day kicked it off the hinges, setting another Cameron precedent as the most expensive film of all time.
It’s a record that’s been surpassed several times over – not least of all by Cameron himself – but even though he’s content to seemingly spend the remainder of his career cranking out additional Avatar instalments, each one of them can be relied upon to push the boundaries of the medium’s visual capabilities at least one significant step forward.
He still finds the time to revisit the franchises he once worked on, though even his long-awaited return as the co-writer and producer of Terminator: Dark Fate didn’t quite go according to plan. He’s also watched the ongoing Alien saga from afar, with Cameron having plenty to say on the films that followed in his wake.
During a Reddit AMA, the Academy Award winner would brand Ridley Scott’s Prometheus as “an interesting film”, one that he found “thought-provoking and beautifully, visually mounted”. However, he was forced to admit that “at the end of the day it didn’t add up logically”. Still, he “liked it better than the previous two Alien sequels”, which is a widely-held opinion, with the dismal Alien vs. Predator crossovers thankfully going unmentioned.
He offered a similar appraisal on Scott’s Alien: Covenant, too, prefaced by Cameron stating, “It’s not a film that I would have made”. Nonetheless, he found it to be “a great ride”. Having the franchise’s two most prominent directors partner up on a Xenomorph story is any fan’s dream and one that almost came to fruition in the 1990s.
In the same AMA, Cameron revealed that there was a plan in place for him to write and produce a new Alien feature that Scott would direct, which would have facilitated the return of Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley. Despite the Hollywood titans being “in violent agreement”, studio 20th Century Fox opted to forge ahead with Alien vs. Predator instead to rip the dream away before the world was even informed it was a viable option.
Of course, the Alien brand is alive and well as Disney develops a new big-screen release and a TV series, with the ship having long since sailed on Cameron making any kind of comeback.
