hitmanyr2k said:
And they would be wrong lol. Nothing Anderson has done even comes close to Cameron when factoring action, characters, and story.
Let's talk story. The obvious place to compare is Aliens vs. AVP. Aliens is undoubtedly the better movie. It's more intense, the action is more satisfying because it's so edge-of-your-seat.
But you know, when I saw Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil and AVP, there's a reason why people CHEERED at numerous action sequences on that opening weekend. These movies get you pumped, your adrenaline rushing. For tension, RE's got it in spades (sadly moreso than AVP did).
Story? Well, Cameron had a great hook - Ripley, the only survivor, teams up with marines and goes back. Simple, very effective.
In comparison, it's pretty much impossible to argue that Anderson's hook isn't the more intelligent, creative piece of story. Combining the knowledge of Predators in our past from Predator 2 with the similarities of various cultures as noted by archelelogists, and the outlandish belief some individuals have pressed that "extraterrestrials" were the only possible source of our inexplicable ancient building skill, he built an entire movie around the idea that Predators built the pyramids to hunt. Now that's an incredible hook, it pretty much blew my mind when I heard it. An incredibly smart mixture of history with story, it expands on the Predators' backstory tremendously.
Now, does he utilize that set-up as well as Cameron uses his more basic frame? No. Cameron takes a basic framework and makes it so much more in a way that few could. Anderson's films often use their framework to deliver as much as they can on a small budget. It's astonishing to think of how Resident Evil cost the same amount of money as The Punisher. The Punisher looks and feels cheap... with Resident Evil, you get your dollar's worth and then some. He produces the hell out of his budgets. AVP may have only run off of 60 million - and it even had to drop 2 predators from the storyline after the first few drafts! - but damn if he doesn't get everything he can out of that. It looks like it's an 80 or 90-million film.
Characters? Don't even try on that one. They both adhere to the same notion of how to introduce a character. The only difference is that Anderson actually has more UNIQUE characters in his stories. I'm not saying it's bad that Cameron relies on cliched archetypes for groups such as all the marines in Aliens - it's a great shorthand if you can pull it off with some quality actors. Which he does very well in that film - who can deny an ensemble that includes Bill Paxton, Paul Reiser, Michael Biehn, Jeanette Goldstein? I'm just saying that Anderson rarely falls back on such cliches (though he did do it with a couple of people in Resident Evil) instead taking a good half of AVP to set up four or five individuals for the movie ahead. ****, even Resident Evil took longer than that with some of its players - take Kaplan, who becomes a recognizable personality over the course of the film gradually. But in the end, the strength of the performers in Anderson's movies isn't as great, and that hurts his characters enough to bring them down to about equal level with the kinds of guys we found in Aliens or Terminator... well, actually, I'd put them above True Lies still, but I'm just tossing Cameron films out there now.
Of course, it's worth noting that Cameron wrote pretty much all his movies. Anderon's only written two of his films to date. So it's hard to draw a straight line there. You can't compare Mortal Kombat to his other stuff because he didn't write it. You get the idea.
Bottom line: If Cameron was the one who appeared in the '90s and there wasn't as "fresh," would he be despised by the online community viciously? ABSOLUTELY. And just as unjustifiably.
