The Obsession to Hunt

Rating: Null/10 (2 December 2002)

Spoilers herein.
After a few films, you get to know a director's mind. Sometimes that mind is broken or limited in ways that has the serendipitous effect of creating work that the public embraces.
Vincent Van Gogh is one of my icons for this phenomenon, a deeply disturbed man with vast limitations on his vision but one major crack (and a few minor ones)into a whole new world. It doesn't matter whether the artist understands this, though Vincent did and wrote eloquently on it. Either way, when the public embraces such stuff, the world changes. It shifts center to the new way and sometimes seals off the areas the artist never saw. So sometimes, effective art damages us.
Cameron is a force in film, possibly as damaging in his way as Speilberg, but with far fewer and less varied films. What he sees and can display must be attractive to judge from the receipts. What he cannot see is less obvious. Here is his first real film, his `Rocky.'
In my comment on `Aliens,' I noted the radically differing styles of Cameron and the man who invented the sexual, scifi horror genre. Cameron starts with the stunts, adds humor and then finds places for the actors and situations. Most work the other way around. Scott starts with a general vision first; for him, stunts are merely punctuation of the visual space. But Cameron starts with a mechanical skeleton, not at all unlike that shown here.
And then his strategy is to be relentless in eliminating the human elements of the film: those elements like character development, richness of situation, emotional space. He crushes them just like Arnie's cybergoon, because they simply mess up the cleanliness of his movie. Such `soft' stuff is for wimps. Any sort of irony or annotation is for eggheads and who needs em.
In the roughly 20 years since this was made, the film world has changed radically with much energy attracted to the Cameron model. The machines in Hollywood are winning. Four years later, `Die Hard' introduced a simple sort of self-effacing irony into the model and until now that is the only human remnant remaining. It is hidden, and the hardcore action guys often poke fun at it (see `XXX' vs `Men in Black 2'). And more, now life further imitates art with Arnie planning run for political office!
The point is, folks that watching film can be great fun even if the films themselves are poor. All you need to do is place it in the context of the people who made it, and who thereby partly make us.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 4: Has some interesting elements.