All 12 of James Cameron’s Films Ranked, From Worst to Best

As James Hibberd points out in his excellent new profile of the director, you don’t often hear stories about James Cameron being nice. Usually, though, you trust the sincerity of his intensity. He’s in the trenches with his exhausted casts and crews, revolutionizing his craft, drowning in ideas, drowning in actual water. He’s rude for a higher purpose. The exception is True Lies, a jerk movie for assholes. Schwarzenegger’s secret agent hunts terrorists from a swank Swiss gala to the elevators of Washington, D.C. Then he forgets about the villains for a while to conduct fun Orwellian surveillance on his wife. Credit Jamie Lee Curtis for acting her face off as the bored (though never boring) regular spouse improvising herself into sultry-tough spyhood. She’s stuck in Cameron’s most indulgent boomfest. You like dick jokes? Art Malik’s extremist villain crotch-slams onto a fighter jet; Bill Paxton’s sleazebag salesman pisses himself twice. Absent is Cameron’s usual rebel spirit, that snarly half-hippie distrust of any well-funded military-industrial institution. Heavily armed uniformed men in his movies tend to be impotent, cowardly or monstrous. True Lies lets Harry declare, with swagger and no irony: “OK, Marines, it’s time to kick ass!” Send this loser to LV-426.

Anything Cameron did in the 1990s was the biggest thing ever. By comparison, his next decade was quiet and quirky. He tinkered with experimental cameras, explored the ocean — and made documentaries about exploring the ocean with experimental cameras. Ghosts of the Abyss and Aliens of the Deep track his oceanic expeditions with pioneering Imax 3D. (Back then, “Imax” still meant fussy science, “3D” was a bygone fad and it was unlikely any half-naked blue people would ever popularize both formats.) The best thing in these shortish docs is Cameron himself: Chatting with astrobiologists about Jupiter’s moons, nerding out over deepwater microbes, writing a 40-page safety manual on submersible deployment, remote-driving a camera-robot into the wreck of the Titanic to rescue another camera-robot. In hindsight we know this was all very elaborate Avatar predevelopment. At the time, his most popular contribution to 2000s culture was a different nautical adventure: Aquaman, starring Vincent Chase and Mandy Moore, the highest-grossing movie of all time on Entourage.

Putting the actual highest-grossing movie of all time at No. 8 can only seem snotty. Let me be clear: I love Avatar. I love that it’s about a guy learning to groove with nature by sticking his brain-braid into cool places. I love that it’s anti-colonial and anti-technology — and also about how technology helps a white man unwhiten himself. These paradoxes are handmade, reflecting its creator’s far-flung interests. If True Lies was a loud midlife crisis, Avatar finds an older Cameron reconnecting with the fascinations of his youth. Hardcore science-fiction, high fantasy and a Jack Kirby-ish strain of cosmo-spiritualism background a history nut’s mashup narrative: Metaphorical Pocahontas leads Metaphorical Viet Cong against Metaphorical (actual?) Americans burning rainforests for Metaphorical Oil. It can’t compete with the sequels’ visual gobsmack, and the dewy romance between Sam Worthington’s Jake and Zoe Saldaña’s Neytiri lacks the generational scope awaiting the Sully clan. Avatar planted strong roots. This Hometree grew.

Would you believe me if I told you James Cameron built an ocean in a nuclear power plant? Replicating the Atlantic depths for this deep-sea thriller required pouring 7.5 million gallons of water into a defunct power station’s concrete tank. Workdays were submerged. The tank leaked. Cameron’s marriage to producer Gale Anne Hurd was ending. Out of that maelstrom of physical toil and emotional brinksmanship emerged the director’s maddest thriller. I mean “mad” both ways: anger, insanity. Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio are bickering spouses uneasily reunited on a rescue mission to a downed submarine. Their submersible drilling operation gets seized by a lunatic Navy SEAL (Michael Biehn, Cameron’s original go-to guy). The soldier’s pressure-induced psychosis threatens to go thermonuclear when he tries blowing up the aliens with a Trident warhead. Right, yes, the aliens, lingering in the shadows of a nearby cliff. Extraterrestrial CGI earned The Abyss a visual effects Oscar, a nice grace note after the lackluster box office. It’s an amazing technical achievement and probably Cameron’s most personal film. (Here’s the story of married collaborators who work well together yet can’t stand each other — from the man who directed films with his second, fourth and fifth wives and worked on a couple great scripts for third wife Kathryn Bigelow.) It’s just too bad the final act falls off its own cliff, squandering all tension in a flail for Kubrickian transcendence.

Audiences did not flock to The Abyss. So Cameron returned to his first success, invented a new cyborg, skyrocketed the budget and conjured an R-rated kid’s movie. Does that description sound reductive? I was a prepubescent T2 fanboy, bro. I remember the toys and I remember the kids at recess yelling “Hasta la Vista, Baby!” Pitting Schwarzenegger’s anvil-tough cyborg against Robert Patrick’s slippery T-1000 softened the first Terminator’s midnight dread into a rock-em-sock-em monster mash. Talk about a ’90s summer: These robots meet at a mall. Edward Furlong’s squeaky snarl will never be annoying, because I remember when his swoopy-haired dirt-bike dirtbag (who hacks ATMs for arcade quarters!) was the coolest big kid on Earth. Linda Hamilton carries the grown-up weight as a jagged and jacked Sarah Connor, now a psych ward nihilist with an artillery stash. The bombast gets repetitive: bullets, explosions, another truck chase. But you’re made of liquid metal if your eyes don’t leak when the broken Terminator tells the fatherless boy, “I know now why you cry.”

The Na’vi have always seemed a sensitive people, carefree in their enjoyment of nature, dutiful in their dedication to their bio-spiritual community. This threequel asks a simple question: What if one of them was absolutely bugnuts? Enter pyromaniac witch-queen Varang, James Cameron’s first evil alien in 39 years. Franchise newcomer Oona Chaplin’s wild performance epitomizes Fire and Ash’s runaway-train grandiosity. This club has everything: marital strife, jelly-lifted airboats, a psychedelic trip, so many villains, frag arrows, the whales, the whales! Fuddy-duddy old whales sticking to institutional principles despite certain destruction; outcast rebel whales who demand action. I submit to you that these whales are the modern Democrat Party. Fortunately, 71-year-old Cameron has the artistic vitality of an angry young whale. Fire and Ash is where his inner 2001 fanboy meets his inner Conan the Barbarian child, clashing a dystopian gun-metal atmosphere with a deeper strain of B-movie pulp. Opinions certainly vary — check out David Rooney’s full review here — but I love Spider the dreadlocked cave boy and I don’t care who knows it.

Fire and Ash looks glorious in 3D, which is worth mentioning, because 3D is nauseating with anything except a James Cameron movie. He remained the format’s truest believer as the post-Avatar craze dwindled through the 2010s into cheap tricks and muddy post-conversions. It was possible to worry he was getting left behind — or becoming another Peter Jackson, a dynamic storyteller lost in pointless technical innovation. After a decade of blown release dates, The Way of Water certainly looks great, ditching the first film’s lush jungles for a seafoam coastline. The real surprise — the reason it’s the saga’s peak entry — is how much Cameron luxuriates in the emotional turbulence of the swollen Sully family. Leaving the first film’s conventional love story behind, Water follows Pandora’s hippest teens on divergent coming-of-age odysseys: teen romance, spiritual discovery, a vengeful maniac bio-dad. The youth focus sidelines Neytiri, a flaw I forgive after her renewed prominence in Fire and Ash. And where the third film goes dizzy from overplotting, Water is pure mood board: sun-dappled waves, elaborate creatures, the simple fact that you’re kinda watching a bunch of aliens take a long beach vacation.

If I had to pick a single defining flaw in Cameron’s career, it’s the music. He never found his John Williams or his Bernard Herrmann, a musician who could enhance his visual sensibility. His most frequent composer was the late James Horner, whose penchant for old-fashioned orchestral oomph didn’t really match the fantastical grime of Cameron’s science fiction. (I obviously love Aliens, and I still think it would be better with no music.) But Horner gave Cameron Titanic. Irish pipes, synth choir, a Norwegian soprano vocalizing over a tinkling piano: The score is weirder and more expansive than the movie. Throw in the ultimate end-credits love anthem and you’ve got a sonic vocabulary that made Titanic’s phenomenon echo far outside the theater.

The daylight CGI looks chintzy now. Billy Zane is smarm and lips. It’s weird Fabrizio has nothing to do. None of which matters, because in the lead roles Cameron cast a couple up-and-comers who became two of their generation’s great screen personalities. Leonardo DiCaprio makes Jack seem wounded and yearning when he talks about his bohemian art boy wanderings. Kate Winslet’s eyes flare with desperation and humor as she swans around First Class. On the prow at sunset, they’re Romance incarnate. And when history comes for them, they never let go. The chemistry keeps the movie shocking and alive on rewatch. Even knowing the plot beats of doom, you find yourself hoping these two crazy kids might just make it. In the end, maybe they do? Life only lasts a lifetime. Hearts go on. 

It’s so quiet. Fandom recalls this Alien sequel as the heavy-metal sequel, pluralizing Ridley Scott’s claustrophobic original by airdropping jarheads into a creature colony. Worth remembering the monsters don’t show up until the one-hour mark. Instead, Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley awakens from cryo-slumber to disgrace and demotion. With no prospects beyond cargo-load detail, she joins a mission with the Colonial Marines. These “very tough hombres” are delightful, outrageous — and the first act’s default antagonists, dismissing Ripley as a weakling crank. Oh, she shows them. The action, when it comes, is magnificent. The real standout moments slither with nightmare patience: pinging motion sensors, sizzling blowtorches, an egg slime-crunching out an infernal birth canal, Carrie Henn’s whispers as sole survivor Newt.

Cameron was an artist first — his 2021 coffee-table book Tech Noir is essential reading — and he sketched a lot of Aliens’ hardware himself. So there’s a palpable weight to all the functionality, like the Steadicam-derived apparatus that keeps the machine guns from bouncing, or the way Ripley duct-tapes a flamethrower to her pulse rifle. When Michael Biehn’s Corporal Hicks teaches her to “feel the weight” of a weapon, it’s an utmost Cameron gearhead moment, half flirtatious and half empowering. (Four decades later, Fire and Ash replays that sexy tutorial with heavier artillery.) The director saw a military future of smart-helmet bodycams; the xenomorphs’ dots-on-a-screen approach is practically the first great Google Maps setpiece. As the brash soldiers fall under tongue tooth and claw, Aliens chest-bursts into its final form as a maternal showdown. A Queen-on-Queen duel from subterranean depths up to outer space? In the immortal words of Bill Paxton’s Private Hudson: Fuckin’ A.

After this shoestring chase film came big sets, boats, water tanks, 3D cameras and computers. Nothing wrong with that. Major directors nowadays get lost in a couple directions, embracing lifeless CGI or rooting themselves defensively in analogue craft. Cameron found a third way. In life he became a human extremophile, seeking realer realities on the ocean floor. The exploring kept him grounded while his day job pushed the techno-cinematic bleeding edge. He has always believed in the future — and worried about it. We know this because his masterwork is about someone who finds out tomorrow wants her dead.

For my money, Linda Hamilton’s first performance as Sarah Connor is richer than her legendary T2 toughness. For her, it’s just another day of annoying customers and the dire Los Angeles dating scene. Then circumstances make her a target, a fugitive, the new Madonna and the coolest person to ever use a hydraulic press. It’s always personal with Cameron, who based Sarah’s personality on his sassy-waitress first wife Sharon. (With Hamilton onscreen and producer Hurd co-writing, Terminator seems less like an action flick than a feat of creative polyamory.)

The apocalyptic peeks still stun. More impressive is how the director finds so much tech noir in back alleys, cheap motels and parking garages. What Terminator lacks in budget, it makes up with sheer screaming-steel relentlessness. Schwarzenegger is an unstoppable golem of firepower. Biehn’s time-tossed bodyguard is a helpless scrambling David who will never defeat his Goliath. All the dudes — cops, punks, cyborgs, soldiers — are locked in a death spiral. Salvation depends on a young woman from Big Bear becoming a prepper boymom with a jeep, a thousand-yard stare and a forehead bandana. At the height of Cold War atomic terror, The Terminator discovered the 2020s in the 1980s. It begins four years from now in a world broken by military overreach and artificial intelligence. If the storm’s still coming, at least James Cameron taught us how to sink.