Salute Your Shorts: James Cameron's Xenogenesis

Salute Your Shorts is a weekly column that looks at short films, music videos, commercials or any other short form visual media that generally gets ignored.

Before James Cameron became a fabulously successful feature-film director, and long before he inexplicably became a mediocre nature documentarian, and long, long before his triumphant return to feature filmmaking, he was a truck driver. This doesn’t have too much bearing on anything, but it’s good to keep some sense of perspective on things. Sure, the man’s movies have made well over a billion dollars in theaters alone, but his rags-to-riches tale is one of the true American Dream—err, it would be, if he weren’t Canadian. In any case, we’ve all got to start out somewhere, and with Cameron, that "somewhere" involved driving a lot of trucks.

But something happened in 1977, not just to Cameron but to the nation at large. No, not Jimmy Carter taking the reigns of the country and leading it into four years of smart energy conservation as “History’s Greatest Monster.” Star Wars, later subtitled A New Hope, came out and made science fiction ever-so-briefly cool again. Cameron saw the movie and realized that perhaps truck driving wasn’t, in fact, his calling. He quit his job, wrote a short script (such as it was), and almost inconceivably talked his way into $20,000 worth of funding (from a consortium of dentists looking for a quick tax write-off, no less) for his film "Xenogenesis." According to another, more apocryphal story, the consortium of dentists were actually a group of Freemasons looking to begin experimenting in new mind control methods with Cameron…but those claims are probably not entirely true.

Shortly after he completed “Xenogenesis,” Cameron joined up with that paragon of cheap cinema, Roger Corman, and learned his trade the old-fashioned way, beginning as a special-effects supervisor and gradually rising through the ranks until he took over Piranha II: The Spawning. But the James Cameron who was found suitable to take over that movie and soon afterwards put together his breakthrough with the independently produced Terminator was not the same James Cameron who directed “Xenogenesis.” Three years separated his first two directorial efforts, and it would be another three before Terminator made its way into theaters.

That being said, “Xenogenesis” is way better than it has any right to be. After a quick introduction that doesn’t have too much to do with the rest of the short, “Xenogenesis” picks up surprisingly in medias res with a man named Raj walking down the hallways of an austere, post-Star Wars version of the future. He’s investigating an abandoned culture of some sort and finds himself wondering about how things could be so clean and sterile. A doorway opens and he’s accosted by a dusting/security robot who has it in for him for unexplored reasons. After a brief fight with the robot, Raj is knocked off a ledge and will soon spend the rest of the film dangling for dear life. Just as he’s about to be murdered by the dustbuster, a woman named Laurie busts through the door in a mech. She heads over to fight that scourge of men and dustbunnies everywhere, but unfortunately her weapon loses power. The short ends on a cliffhanger, with both characters seemingly in dire straits moments before the credits roll.

At the time he made the film, Cameron was, for obvious reasons, mostly untrained. While he’d frequented the film archives at USC for years, he was by no account particularly skilled from the get-go. There’s a story that most of his first day of shooting was lost when, having deconstructed his shiny new 35mm camera the night before in order to figure out how it worked, he was too busy trying to put it back together to get started.

Still, Cameron designed all the sets himself, worked as cameraman, did all the special effects, edited the movie and most likely did several other jobs as well. It was truly a singular work, and even though most of its budget must have been eaten up by the camera and film stock, “Xenogenesis” doesn’t look as low-budget as it might. The robots look just as imposing as they should and if they don’t move particularly smoothly, this in fact adds to the short’s realism. When more than a decade later Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop was released, its quite similar policebots actually looked quite a bit worse. Its matting techniques are cribbed from the pros and he managed to make things look appropriately epic. Untrained as he was, and rough as the film’s edges obviously are, there’s real skill behind these effects.

More importantly, there’s skill behind the filmmaking. It’s not just special-effects emulation that’s involved; “Xenogenesis” fits together in a way that most student features can’t approach. Cameron’s shot selection isn’t limited by his obvious budget constraints. Instead, he whips out ambitious angles and imbues the short with a ting of expressionism. The cinematography is subdued, but already Cameron’s editing had a sort of aggressive lag, dragging out moments where the audience feels things should go quicker. It’s one of the things that would set him apart from the Bruckheimer school of special effects. Despite the clear delight in what special effects and technology could give him, Cameron was already grounded in good old-fashioned filmmaking technique. It’s classical Hollywood cinema, just with more robots.

For Cameron fans getting ready for Avatar this weekend, the movie also helps offer some of the link between his Terminator days and his obsession for the past several years. The question of organically synthesized life and what it could mean was already an issue for Cameron during the creation of “Xenogenesis.” The short’s introduction is one of the odder bits of cinematic excess that I’m aware of. It doesn’t really have much to do with the rest of the movie and is obviously done in a very different style. (For example, once the voice-over leaves, it’s gone for good.) But it does tell us more about Cameron’s focus on cataclysms, a la Terminator, Titanic and Dark Angel, as well as his view of machines as both the cause of, and the solution to, all of life’s problems. While ultimately a curiosity, “Xenogenesis” does fit in well with the rest of Cameron’s career and offers a road map for what his works would follow.