It becomes plain early on in Titanic (1996), James Cameron’s moneymaking shipwreck of a movie, that Cameron is more keenly interested in puttering about in Davy Jones’ Locker than in relating any story about doomed landlubbers cast adrift on a cruel sea.
And Titanic suffers for that distraction — although its humongous box-office returns suggest that a mass audience found the film to be either dramatically fulfilling or an irresistible endurance test of the how-much-of-this-nonsense-can-you-tolerate? variety.
Cameron was, in any event, out of his depth on Titanic, expect perhaps in the sense of exploring the oceanic vastness in search of mystery. Assign this filmmaker to an intimate human drama, and he’ll transform it to soap-operatic nonsense without breaking a sweat. (Yes, and shouldn’t 1989’s The Abyss have served fair warning of what to expect from Titanic?)
But turn Cameron loose on a desperate adventure or an exploration into unknown territory, and he’ll surface with a gem every time: Hence, for example, Aliens (1986), one of the last century’s three or four best science-fiction thrillers — from a day when Cameron still prized ferocity over sentimentalized contrivances.
And hence the new Aliens of the Deep, an essentially educational documentary film that captures not only the majesty of the brinier depths — but also the fascination therein that keeps luring Cameron back to the ocean. The opening of Aliens of the Deep at Fort Worth’s Omni Theatre gives that venue a commercial box-office edge, and the Omni’s distinctive, domed screen lends the film a sweeping aspect that its three-dimensional flat-screen appearances elsewhere cannot capture.
Cameron proves more effective as a visual storyteller when circumstances do not oblige him to relate a fictionalized yarn. (It bears mentioning right around here that Cameron’s first feature-film project, from 1981, also involved some strange fish. Piranha Part II: The Spawning, the thing was called. Not to read too much into the director’s newer phase, y’know.)
One good thing that Titanic accomplished was to give Cameron the influence and the wherewithal to re-invent himself as an oceanic explorer, specializing — like Jacques Cousteau and J. Ernest Williamson in times earlier — in close-range examinations of the sea. Cameron’s medium of preference is the Imax superscreen format, in which he already has delivered such striking pictures as Ghosts of the Abyss (2003) and, as executive producer, Volcanoes of the Deep Sea (2003).
Cameron and his crew — non-actors who go about their jobs with companionable efficiency — devote Aliens of the Deep to a search for what the director calls "the most insane alien life forms that have ever been discovered." (Alien, of course, being a relative term.) The director has peopled the expedition with an odd mixture of marine biologists and space researchers, explaining that "these deep-ocean expeditions always seem like space missions to me."
He is stating here an oddly persuasive case for familiarizing oneself with the marine depths, just in case some distant-future space safari should run across a watery planet filled with similar forms of life. And it bears mentioning here that many scientists believe one of Jupiter’s moons to be, essentially, an orbiting ocean.
This obsessive interest in astro-biology tends to detract from the earthbound and waterlogged vistas thus captured. Cameron’s speculations about the possibility of life on other planets often clash with the spectacle of his expeditionary footage: Who cares about what one might find out in distant space when such awe-inspiring specimens are right here for the gawking on Planet Earth?
And of course, it’s Jim Cameron’s film, so he should make of it what he will. Suffice that Aliens of the Deep is a solidly entertaining piece of natural spectacle — though less successful as a tract for pseudo-scientific speculation.
The past few years’ foray into such documentary accounts has established a promising new phase in an uneven but seldom un-interesting career. Cameron was a more intriguing talent in the fictional realm before The Abyss betrayed his pretentions to a higher artistry. Now, Aliens of the Deep and its companion pieces have revealed that Cameron’s truer art may lie in the wonders of exploratory adventure, where the story at hand requires no fabricated plotting. If his announced return to feature-filmmaking, with a picture called Battle Angel, doesn’t work out, he can always take another dunk in the ocean. (G)