He's up there. You can take one of his movies to a film school to teach cutting, editing, and general principles of direction. Frankly his natural command of the medium approaches the classical Arts.
He's sterile. He doesn't have the perverse personal demons that drove Hitchcock. And he doesn't have the dark optimism of say, a Frank Capra.
What he's got is a body of previous work he morbidly self-references -- that scene of the bodies floating was taken and expanded from Empire of the Sun's opening.
He's also got is a fair amount of technical skill and the burden of a hundred million dollar budget that fairly effectively wiped any humanity out of the picture.