James Cameron is one of the most successful filmmakers of all time, despite having only directed eight feature films throughout his 45 years in Hollywood (soon to be nine with the release of Avatar: The Way of Water). He has made some of the highest-grossing films of all time, movies which have been seen by people all over the world and have left a lasting impression on generations. As the director’s work has been highly studied, there are certainly recurring themes and motifs that show up across his work. He tends to feature strong women protagonists, he has critiques about the military, tends to feature star-crossed lovers, and he loves the color blue.

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Yet one notable theme that pops up across much of his filmography is a critique of corporations. In fact, in many of his films, corporations are the driving threat, even in films including killer aliens. The quest for wealth is said to often be a hole in humans’ hearts that can never be filled. In films like Aliens, the Terminator movies, Avatar, and Titanic, Cameron explores the evil of profit-driven motivation and what separates his films’ heroes from the villains.

Aliens: Corporations Turn People Into Monsters

     20th Century Fox

Aliens builds off the foundation of the original 1979 Alien and fills in the details of the evil fictional corporation. The company is left nameless in the first film, but is given the name Weyland-Yutani in Aliens. The company not only refuses to take Ripley’s testimony seriously, but also continues to repeat its mistakes by trying to retrieve a xenomorph for study despite how many lives it will cost to get it.

Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) practically states Cameron’s thoughts on corporations when she says, “You know, Burke, I don’t know which species is worse. You don’t see them f—–g each other over for a goddamn percentage.” In corporate culture, the bottom line will always come first, and people are expendable. It turns people into monsters, or something even worse when compared to how the Xenomorphs, the actual so-called monsters, can work together. This depressing notion is the real threat underlying the Alien franchise alongside the deadly Xenomorphs, but it also has countless real-world examples.

The Terminator: Cogs in a Machine

     Paramount PicturesTri-Star

Terminator and its sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day is clearly more focused on the fears of artificial intelligence and advanced robotics, but there still are parables of corporate greed. The most obvious is the fact that a corporation tends to refer to the people that make it up as “cogs in a machine.” The main threat of the series is Skynet, an artificial neural network controlling the machine uprising. Skynet was invented by Cyberdyne Systems for the United States government, and the corporation and military collaboration eventually leads to the apocalypse.

It is worth noting that Terminator 2: Judgment Day does draw a distinction between the people who make up a company and the company as an entity itself. Miles Bennett Dyson (Joe Morton) is the director of special projects at Cyberdyne Systems Corporation, and at first Sarah Connor believes the only way she can save the future is to kill him. She cannot separate the man from the company he is working with. Yet when given a chance, Dyson quickly gets onboard with the idea that his work is not above his actual existence, and decides to destroy his work. A corporation is faceless, but the people who make it up have the potential to be either good or evil.

Avatar: Nothing Worse Than a Bad Quarterly Statement

     20th Century Studios

Of all the films in Cameron’s filmography, Avatar is the bluntest with its critique of corporations (and its political collaboration). The movie’s plot is driven by the needs of Resource Development Administrations, or RDA. RDA has come to Pandora to extract the rare mineral unobtanium, and will go to whatever means to accomplish its goals. It means invading a planet, moving the indigenous species from their home, and employing a private military outfit. Every negative plot point in Avatar is rooted in corporate greed.

Much like his work in Aliens, Cameron’s thoughts on corporations are said in a single dialogue. Yet unlike Aliens, where it is Ripley railing against the company, here it is straight from the mouth of the unsubtly named RDA corporate administrator Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi) when he says, “One thing that shareholders hate more than bad press is a bad quarterly statement.” This is the underlying theme across Cameron’s work regarding corporations. At the end of the day, it isn’t the people that matter, it is the money.

Titanic: Money Can’t Buy You Love

     Paramount Pictures

Across James Cameron’s filmography, he paints a clear picture of corporations as faceless entities being run by individuals who are only looking out for themselves. The quest for profit is the root of evil in films like Avatar and Aliens. Yet the quest for wealth as the cause of pain is not just rooted in corporations, but also in people, as is the case with Titanic.

Titanic is a movie with wealth, class, and privilege at its center, as Rose (Kate Winslet) is about to enter a loveless marriage with someone she doesn’t want to in an attempt to resolve her family’s financial problems. This desire for wealth, one that is not Rose’s choice but rather cast upon her, almost costs Rose her life but is saved when she embraces love. Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) shows Rose what his life (poor in wealth, rich in humanity) is like, and before the ship hits the iceberg she makes the decision to go away with him. She is not making a decision motivated by money, but by a love that becomes a key to her happiness.

Love and commerce are conflicting ideologies in Cameron’s work, but it is love that always wins the day. Be it Jake and Neytiri in Avatar, Sarah Connor’s love for her son John in the Terminator films, or Ripley’s adoptive mother’s love for Newt in Aliens, these characters are individuals who put others first. A corporation can never do that, as it is a faceless entity that is only designed to create profit for those invested in it. In Cameron’s oeuvre, money drives people to do terrible things, but love makes them heroes.