 Originally Posted by bassman
What would you consider his worst? I'm hoping you don't say True Lies......
Titanic always gets hate too, but I've always stood my ground and said it's a great flick. Most people can't get past the fact that he had to inject fictional characters into the plot, but I argue that there wouldn't be a movie without it.
Cameron's worst is Piranha II: The Spawning ... but you can see little glimmers of him in the film ... but yeah, that's his worst (an easy statement alright, haha). I actually really enjoy True Lies - does that one get a lot of stick? I've always enjoyed it. It's not his best work, but it's also jolly good fun and does everything you want an action comedy to do. 
Titanic - first time I saw it I was more interested in the boat sinking stuff. All the big technical action set pieces ... then I hated it, but that was more a case of me being an arrogant teenager - and all teenagers think they know everything - and looking to fit-in with 'popular opinion' on the film. However, my mood softened on it, and then a couple of years ago I got the 4-disc DVD and dived into that. Again, Titanic isn't JC's best work, but it's an immense undertaking nonetheless. Again, it's JC's 'broad brush' storytelling, and I think it's more appropriate to have fictional characters in there - you need a couple of follow throughout, and it'd be wrong to take real people and just make stuff up about a fictional romance between real people. Now, real people were represented - you can't ignore them as it's a historical movie - but with the central thrust being Kate & Leo, it was the right choice to make them fictional.
Design wise Titanic was brilliant - the sheer attention to detail, the research, the recreation of the ship, using original blue prints etc to get everything just-so (down to the correct cutlery and plates!). Does it play to the audience? Oh God yes - but it's supposed to, and really, most movies play to their audience. There's different ways of playing to your audience, but if you don't play to your audience, your audience won't give a shit about your movie ... different ways of doing it - very different ways - but they all, in their own ways, play to their audience.
Broad brush, grand, sweeping ... again, I've never been a part of 'the Titanic craze' surrounding that movie, but recently I've been able to appreciate it for what it is and enjoy it.
Originally Posted by EvilNed
I've always been surprised by people who say the design is brilliant.
Really? Is it? To me, everything seemed really bland. I'm talking mostly about creature design here, but most of the animals on pandora look just like animals on earth. There's your Space-Horses, your space-Jaguars and your space-Rhinos. Where's the brilliant design? The jungle? It's an OK jungle, but brilliant? That's higher praise than anything in this film deserves.
Perhaps "brilliant" isn't quite the correct word for my context, but what I mean is that the design on the film is extremely detailed and well thought-out. Having explored the extra features on the special edition, there's a lot of info that goes into the designing of the machines, the creatures, the plant life, and the general world of Pandora. Of course they used 'earth bound nature' as an inspiration - if you don't base it on things that are somewhat familiar to we humans, then you could just design any damn nonsense, but it'd just be gibberish to us. We wouldn't understand it - so to use, for example, deep sea creatures as inspiration for certain life forms on Pandora is a good idea ... particularly as the deep sea has only been scratched at thus far, it's essentially an alien world on our own planet.
Now, I'd say that the design on Prometheus was better than Avatar (again, the massive making-of goes into great detail about the design process), but why I said the design was brilliant was because they realised an entire world. Lazier designers would just say "that's good enough", but there'd be various gaps in the world around them. Great design - like on Avatar or Prometheus - goes right down to each individual warning sticker somewhere in the background. You might never see it, but it's there in the background, adding to the fully realised nature of the world being presented on screen.
Likewise with Pandora, it had a fully realised feel - what's more, it felt like there was much more out there to explore. Just because you don't like the film itself, it doesn't mean that an extraordinary amount of time, effort, skill, and passion went into designing Pandora.
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Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. [click for more]
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