Before we get to the meat of this I can't resist the temptation to self-quote regarding James Cameron and his films, some of which I like.
http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2013/02/james-camerons-avatar-as-work-of.html
Years ago a friend described James Cameron's film Avatar as "hard sci-fi" and while in the past I could only snort in disbelief today I can provide a different reply with greater specificity:
James Cameron's film Avatar is to hard science fiction what My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is to socialist realism.
So ... with Cameron in mind ...
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/aug/24/james-cameron-well-never-be-able-to-reproduce-the-shock-of-terminator-2
...
Even in a town full of megalomaniac monsters, stories about Cameron’s obsessiveness are part of Hollywood legend: he would get so enraged when crew members’ phones rang on the Avatar set he would nail-gun them to the wall (the phones, not the crew members, that is, although it probably could have gone either way). During the shooting of The Abyss, the crew took to wearing T-shirts that said: “You can’t scare me, I work for Jim Cameron.”
During our interview back then, in which he talked about the 3D-ification of a 12-year-old movie as if it were the most important development in cinema, he pretty well maintained his temper so it seemed safe to ask the question I’d always wondered about Titanic: “Why couldn’t Rose just share her giant board with Jack instead of leaving him to freeze in the ocean?” His face pinked with fury: “Wait a minute, I’m going to call up William Shakespeare and ask why Romeo and Juliet had to die!” You can’t scare me, I interviewed Jim Cameron.
...
I still haven't seen Titanic and I still don't plan to ever see it. As soon as I read that it was a fictional romantic drama I was already done with it, never mind Jack or Rose in more particular terms. There was no necessary reason for there to be a romance to tell the story of the ship. I riffed on a proposal that James Cameron can be thought of as a Michael Bay for blue state voters around the time Avatar came out.
Since Avatar was more or less Billy Jack in Space, and is yet another riff on the magic white boy who becomes super-Indian and gets the Indian princess and saves the day I would consider Cameron's filmography since 2009 to be more of a step backward than Wonder Woman finally having a feature length film after being a comics character for three quarters of a century. The difference between a James Cameron and a Michael Bay is not unclear. Cameron can frame shots clearly and pays more attention to cross-film cohesion but his characters are still tropes.
I have not really bought that Cameron is the advocate for strong female characters that he seems to be credited for, just as I don't really think that about Joss Whedon, either. My impression is that these are men who by exigencies of providence were fortunate enough to work with women talented enough, smart enough, ambitious enough and patient enough to bring life into stuff he wrote that, in other hands, would be pedantic trope-work. It's still pedantic trope-work even in Terminator 2 but it works because of whose shoulders carried that burden.
A guy who plans on making even one sequel to Avatar is taking the film industry several steps further back than I think Jenkins and company did with Wonder Woman. I don't think Wonder Woman constitutes a step back, it was an overdue and fun feature length film for the first super-heroine and it's a fun movie, warts and all. That the film industry has been too swift to congratulate itself, I'm not going to fault Cameron for having complaints about that; it's just that, to me, James Cameron has ultimately done more to make the blockbuster juggernaut what it has been over the last thirty years than Patty Jenkins could have possibly done with just one very fun popcorn movie.
And Wonder Woman isn't Dances with Smurfs, as South Park called it when sending up Avatar years ago.
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