So James Cameron is making Avatar. Or sorry, Avatar — IMDB isn’t that helpful.
I don’t totally trust Cameron. Yeah, he’s made some geek classics — in fact the streak comprising Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, and then T2, all in a row, 1984-1991, is probably one of the all-time great feats of nerd cinema. (I was going to attempt some baseball analogy just now, something to do with Ted Williams or Joe Dimaggio or somebody? But then I remembered I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT BASEBALL.) But I guess I just don’t always feel that it’s coming from a genuinely nerdy place. Cameron is too in love with big muscles. Must the jocks always win?
But he’s certainly one of the greatest technical directors of all time. That alone makes Titanic almost watchable — if you can somehow bracket the tween-friendly love story and think of it as an art-movie about the slow demolition of a large metal structure, it’s mesmerizing. Bottom line, I don’t expect that much from Avatar itself, the movie. But I bet it’ll generate a lot of really great software that other people can then put to better use.
And the whole future-soldier thing reminds me: who owns the rights to The Forever War?
Update: oh, snap, I just realized that we have a Q&A with Cameron on our own damn site. This is the bestest magazine ever.