Simon's Movie Reviews

  Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) should be what all action movie sequels aim to be. Some people say less is more; James Cameron says more is more. With this sequel he pitted two terminators against each other, turned Linda Hamilton into a heroine for the ages, and just as he did with Aliens, he increased the scale of the action sequences by 10. On paper the concept for the Terminator films sounds like a low-grade B movie: a robot from the future, played by an Austrian actor with the world’s thickest accent, is sent to the past to kill the leader of the human resistance. What ended up on screen is a ground-breaking special effects bonanza that takes viewers on an epic adventure. This was a seminal 90s movie, so of course my brother and I ended up owning a copy on VHS, which had repeated viewings. Some of the action scenes were probably too graphic for my age at the time, but I’m not complaining. Whenever I feel today’s action movies have too many G-rated gunfights with superhe...

It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes a movie can change a person. For me that movie was James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), a movie that made an action icon out of Sigourney Weaver after pitting her against an army of nightmarish creatures and their giant queen. This movie came out the year I was born and while I was growing up it increased in popularity achieving classic stardom as a science fiction, action and horror film. Unfortunately while I was growing up I must admit I was scared of most movie monsters, to the point that just the trailer for an Alien movie would make me nervous. Then I saw Cameron’s film and went to the dark side of the moon. Here’s the setting: it’s 2002 and my parents and I are living in Santiago, Chile. By then I haven’t seen any of the Alien films from beginning to end, but I have a general idea of what they do and how they tend to pop out of people’s chests. One evening I see that Aliens is about to start playing on a movie channel and I decide to tak...

The film that launched James Cameron’s career into overdrive and made Arnold Schwarzenegger a global action star, The Terminator (1984) encompasses the ultimate technological nightmare. An action movie about a cyborg sent from the future to kill the mother of the man who would ultimately stop the rise of the machines, the first film in the Terminator franchise is still as relevant and thrilling today as it was 29 years ago. Over the past decades we have become increasingly dependent on technology, so what if one day those machines became sentient and decide to wipe out their creators? It was science-fiction in the 1980s, but today unmanned drones can fly in just about any airspace and wipe out entire villages. Just how much artificial intelligence do these things need before they get tired of taking orders from a man sitting in front of a computer? A megahit that would spawn three sequels (so far) and a TV show, The Terminator was part of popular culture in the 1990s. It came ...

An old-school Hollywood epic, James Cameron’s “Titanic” nearly sank its director. Cameron built a giant scale of the ship for the sinking scenes, had the interior rooms reproduced exactly as originally built, yelled at his crew when things went wrong, had cast members stay in the water for so long many of them got sick with the flu and ballooned the film’s budget to $200 million, 66 percent over its original budget of $120 million. Studio executives panicked and wanted to cut the running time of the 3-hour epic, but Cameron said they would have to fire him first. He ended up getting the last laugh as his movie grossed over $2 billion worldwide, a record later beaten by his own “Avatar,” and won 11 Academy Awards. It also gave the world that overplayed Céline Dion song, but you can’t win them all. When “Titanic” was released in the Holiday season of 1997, my family and I were living in South America, so it was three hours of Spanish subtitles. Back then I wasn’t a...