Before James Cameron started making chick flicks, he directed rock-solid action movies. One of his eventual trademarks was to have equally rock-solid female leads in his movies as well. Indeed, he often took actresses known for more dramatic or glamorous roles and converted them into ball-busting, ass-kicking, no-BS warriors.
For example, in the first Terminator movie, Linda Hamilton was the mousy damsel-in-distress Sarah Connor, but in Terminator 2, she was revamped as a gun-toting, goggles-sporting, bad-ass cyber-assassin. If we were to denote this operation as Cameronization, which we can identify with a little actiony lightning bolt like
then we can summarize the above observation as
Similarly, in the first Alien movie, Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley was a quiet warrant officer, who mostly played second fiddle to her crew-members until, well, there weren’t any crew members left. However, in Aliens, Weaver comes out of cryosleep ready to nuke ’em from orbit and chew bubble gum, and she’s all out of bubble gum.
It even works when the actress isn’t continuing a role. Jamie Lee Curtis got her break as a timid, chaste teen terrorized by William Shatner’s face in Halloween, but after being Cameronized in True Lies, she emerges as sleek, sexy superspy capable of beating down terorists with wine bottles. Also, boobs.
So it would be interesting to see what happens if you Cameronize a chick who’s already buff and ballsy and action-hero-y? Somewone like, say, Jeanette Goldstein, who played the muscle-bound Puerto Rican space marine Vasquez from Aliens. What happens if you Cameronize her?
Does the cinematic universe explode about a singularity of estrogen-fueled action fury? Dare we try??
Yes!
Er… no. She becomes the frumpy suburban housewife from Terminator 2. The one who gets killed by the T-1000.
Huh. I guess Cameronization is invertible.