[Those of us who viewed the sweeping technological changes that were transform<br > ing filmmaking in the "90s with ambivalence， if not downright skepticism， wer~<br > distinctly in the minority - and we weren t an especially vocal minori~ at that<br > When I interviewed Terminator director James Cameron just before the release oj<br > Strange Days， the dystopian sci-fi flick he co-wrote and produced， I was therefor~<br >shocked to discover that Cameron and I were fellow travelers.<br > On paper， Cameron should have been among the least likely Tinseltown neo-<br >Luddites. Virtually everyfilm he s ever made has relied heavily on special effects for<br >visual impact. His turgid 1989 2001 redux The Abyss and his ridiculously suc-<br >cessful 1991 Terminator sequel were largely thought to be the two films that "broke"<br >state-of-the-art computer animation technologies into mainstream fihn; Cameron<br >even operates his own digital effects production company， Digital Domain， which<br >has rapidly emerged as one of the foremost challengers to the absolute hegemony<br >over effects work maintained by George Lucas" Industrial Light & Magic.<br > Yet Cameron s technophobic films are another matter entirely. His pre-Titanic<br >signature works - The Terminator， Terminator 2 and the inventive if xenophobic<br >Alien sequel-cure-war-movie Aliens - were unsettling techno-parables， set in par-<br >allel universes where unintended ramifications of futuristic technology threaten to<br >wipe out the human race. By the time he produced Strange Days Cameron was<br >already well at work on pre-production for Titanic - a fact-based fiction staged<br >against one of the most grotesque historical examples of humanity s misplaced faith<br >in the !nv. in cibility of man-made artifacts.<br >