Xenogenesis

Xenogenesis (1978) is James Cameron's first film. Essentially a 12 minute demo reel for the young director's stop-motion prowess, it predates even his god-awful feature directorial debut, Piranha II: The Spawning. Six years later, The Terminator would become a runaway hit, and thirteen years after that, Cameron would be the King of the World, winning a fistfull of Oscars for his "200 million dollar chick flick," Titanic. In between he would make a series of popular, thoughtful, character-driven genre films that reinvented special effects technology without sacrificing storytelling prowess.

Despite its ambition and impressive do-it-yourself special effects, Xenogenesis didn't become a feature, but it did get the fledgling Canadian filmmaker a gig at New World Pictures in the art department. He toiled on Roger Corman flicks like Android, Battle Beyond the Stars and Galaxy of Terror, even doing some matte painting for John Carpenter's Escape From New York. Under Corman, he formed a partnership with an ambitious young producer named Gale Ann Hurd Together, they would put together The Terminator, Aliens, and The Abyss.

The robot-battling soldier of the future in Xenogenesis is played by William Wisher, who would co-write Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The credited co-writer/director/ producer, Randy Frakes, would help Wisher, Cameron, and Hurd write The Terminator's screenplay and pen the novelizations of the first two Terminator movies.

The striking thing about this short are the number of future Cameron tropes and images on display. Man vs. machine. The apocalypse. Man's need to repopulate a dying world. Mechs with tank treads. Tough female characters. It rivals Martin Scorsese's Who's That Knocking at My Door? for sheer number of seminal directorly moments. All of his themes were there from the beginning: