‘80s Action Week: Aliens (James Cameron, 1986)

So I took an unintended break from this blog for the past few months. Not because I didn’t have anything to write about, but because I had too much to write about, most of it for other places. One of the big things I worked on over this time was a list for Vulture of the 25 Best Action Movies Since Die Hard, a piece that got a lot of people reading and thinking and calling me names, as intended. One of the best things about writing it was revisiting the great action films of the 1990s – kind of a banner decade, what with films like Speed, The Rock, Point Break, Hard-Boiled, Terminator 2, etc. But one of my regrets about the list was that, because we pegged it to Die Hard, I had to ignore a lot of the great action films of the 1980s – an altogether more complicated and darker lot, I think, than most of the ones that came later.

So, I’ve decided to dedicate the first week of my return to the blog to ‘80s Action. For the next five days, each day I will highlight one great, seminal action film from this decade. Here’s the first one.

Titanic: The Chaos Dark and Rude

I saw Titanic so many times in the theater when it first came out that I was practically made an honorary thirteen-year-old girl. (I know I’ve made that joke before, but it’s a good one, so whatever.) I think I caught it nine or ten times during its theatrical run. This wasn’t easy, because, for all the film’s acclaim and success, in my circles (and by “circles,” I mean basically, “my then-girlfriend’s friends”), it wasn’t regarded very highly. In fact, I seem to recall a couple of lengthy dinners where I was mocked mercilessly for my love of the film.

I never quite managed to explain why I loved Titanic so much. I mean, sure, it’s big, it’s beautiful, it’s tragic, I cried, etc. But when I tried to make an actual case for the movie, more often than not I found myself explaining why I didn’t hate it, or at least didn’t hate certain things about it. For example, the dialogue between Jack and Rose never bothered me, simply because I accepted them as kids. (If Rose is 101 years old during the present-day scenes, and if the present day is indeed 1997, then she’d have been 16 years old in 1912.) The big, blustery emotions of the film didn’t bother me either; despite all his proficiency with technology and special effects, Cameron has always had a way with melodrama that marks him as an old-fashioned director at heart. Dana Stevens is right when she notes that, having originated during a suicide attempt, “far from being a moony-eyed gazefest out of a Nicolas Sparks novel, Rose and Jack’s love is presented as a matter of life and death from the start.”

No, to get at why I love Titanic so much, I may need to flash back a little further.