Ever since Piranha IIJames Cameron shown his friendship with Luc Besson. Both directors are obsessed with marine biology, both are obsessed with strong female characters and both have a strange fascination with the youth. Luc Besson's Leon, The Family and Arthur films have strong child characters in some rather fucked up situations. James Cameron with Aliens, Terminator 2 and the Avatar franchise does the same thing. But have you ever thought how similar both the Terminator and Leon actually are?
1994 film True Lies feels like watching a James Cameron directed Michael Bay movie. It has explosions, check, it has outlandish set pieces, check, it has beautiful shots of the military, check, it has sexy ladies, check, it has teenagers with an attitude, check. It is a Michael Bay movie through and through. Yet it is a James Cameron movie, so what happened?
Before Jerry Bruckheimer was obsessed with telling all his directors to be like Michael Bay and before Don Simpson had passed away. The duo of Simpson and Bruckheimer were obsessed with Tony Scott, the director of such classics as Top Gun, Days of Thunder and Enemy of the State ( which coincidentally were all produced by Jerry and Don, apart from the last film, which was produced after Don's passing ). But Tony Scott didn't only work with the duo. For example in 1993 he made a film not produced by Jerry and Don called True Romance from a screenplay of Quentin Tarantino. Which makes Crimson Tide the second collaboration of the two
The Rock by Michael Bay is about an FBI chemist agent ( Nicolas Cage ) who calls for help from an old retired British Intelligence Agent played by Sean Connery himself. No wander there are theories that this agent character could be James Bond, making this film a kind of unofficial Bayhem!ed sequel to Connery Bond films. It's not like he didn't play James Bond outside of the main franchise. He did play James Bond in Never Say Never Again which is a real James Bond film, which is not a part of the main franchise. So maybe, possibly, he did that again here too. We will never know.