It's basic, bland filmmaking. He uses the same basic shots he learned in Beginning Directing--how is that a sign of good moviemaking? The great directors innovate. If you can take out all the dialogue and know what's going on, all that says is that you're capable of associating one image with the next. The question is, if you do this, what have you lost? In great filmmaking, you lose a lot. With Cameron, it shows his awful dialogue adds nothing to the movie.
And I much prefer Aliens to the dull Ridley Scott original. What characters in that latter film were there?
Seeing how he copied the character of Ripley in The Terminator, Cameron would disagree. Seeing how he copied the charater of Ash in his script for Aliens, Cameron would disagree. The simple brilliance of Yaphet Kotto's Parker is that he's a bitching and moaning 'truck driver in space,' a character who's never appeared in a science fiction movie with that degree of authenticity, right up to the moment when he dies trying to save someone, when before he seemed completely selfish. Scott and O'Bannon and Hill thought up the whole idea of transplanting non-SF movie characters into a SF movie; Cameron just copied them.
They were just bodies waiting to be slaughtered with no significant relationship to one another.
Not true.
The motivations are much more clear in Aliens and the competing motherhood theme is better elucidated.
The "motherhood" thing was a joke, taking the first film's gritty realism and turning what was supposed to be a 'badass' action film into warm and cuddly territory. Scott wasn't afraid to have a tough woman, but Cameron had to show she had...a heart! Awwwww!
The motivations weren't clear in Alien? 'There's a monster loose and we have to kill it'--what was unclear about that? It was the simple, clear drive of the story that made the first one a masterpiece. The second is caught up in silly 'badass' yammering, while the first one had people who talked like people, not comic book characters. (The first encounter with aliens, who might have wiped out a colony, and you send...a completely untested commanding officer, instead of the toughest guy you've got? The ethnically-diverse crew that went out in bad WW2 movies? THIS is Cameron's brilliance?)
Of course he’s not as great as Peckinpah or K. So what...
It was a simple comparison made in response to your estimation of him. He's a B-movie cliche-generator. They were artists.
Not all great directors innovate. And besides Cameron’s visual style is easily identifiable. Like Spielberg or John Carpenter, he’s a natural filmmaker. Do you like silent cinema? You don’t always need dialogue to be the primary narrative force.
In Aliens they weren’t truck drivers they were military. Cameron set out NOT to copy the original (a Gothic horror film) and make a combat film with parallels to Vietnam. Apart from the “truck drivers in space” conceit there was nothing to those characters in the original film. They embodied nothing but a survival instinct - Ripley was a complete cipher. And yes apart from a monster killing people there was nothing to Alien at all, with staring at the Art Direction the only thing left to do during the lulls. Ridley Scott isn’t really a film director - he’s a designer and photographer with minimal narrative sense. In Blade Runner, his style just happened to enhance the subject matter...it was virtually a coincidence.