When an American nuclear submarine goes missing, a crew of deep sea oil drillers led by Virgil "Bud" Brigman (Ed Harris) and his rig’s designer/soon-to-be-ex-wife Lindsey (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) are enlisted to attempt a rescue.
Shadowed by a mysterious Navy SEAL (Michael Biehn), the team finds their search for the submarine overtaken by something else down in the abyss...
While I grew up as a fan of James Cameron, I have no relationship with this movie.
I think I have seen the theatrical cut but I cannot remember much of the experience, so I cannot go into the differences with this 'Special Edition', which came out in 1993.
From a pure production standpoint this movie is fascinating - so much of this movie is real actors interacting with large-scale underwater sets.
The central romance is cliche and maybe not as affecting as it is just functional.
Thank the maker for Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastriantonio. The actors had a tough experience making the film, and that strain comes through. But somehow they manage to make what could have been a slightly condescending relationship into something more alive.
I left the movie slightly underwhelmed.
Part of the reason is personal. I think my relationship with Cameron has changed. When I was a kid, he was a god.
Now I find my tastes have diverged - nothing against his work, but it does not speak to me the way it once did.
There is so much about this movie that I want to applaud.
The reveal of the computer-generated tentacle is still amazing. I have seen critiques of the alien effects at the climax, but I thought they looked great.
The themes are familiar Cameron territory now but feel more like a dry run for Avatar - a conflict between curiosity and a desire to learn, and dogmatic pursuit of singular goals.
Cameron’s single-minded villains are replaced by one Navy SEAL losing his mind and falling into paranoia and violence.
The film is pretty solemn, but there is a neat vein of humour running through the group’s interactions.
Some of the one-liners are obvious, but they felt like the kind of dad joke-adjacent lines these people would make.
There are some surprisingly effective jokes - the reveal of Jammer (John Bedford Lloyd) behind the hatch, Lindsey telling Hippy (Todd Graff ) to not take her side after he derails her account of encountering the UFO.
After two movies (or three, if you include Piranha II: The Spawning) where he had to work within tight budget constraints, The Abyss is the first James Cameron where he has room to expand on his obsessions (the sea, technology, man’s relationship with the world, the threat of militarism).
Whereas The Terminator and Aliens are in constant motion, moving efficiently through their narratives. The Abyss is not interested in momentum.
This movie is the opposite - it is about pausing, thinking about one’s actions, especially alternatives to violence.
Michael Biehn’s casting as Coffey almost feelings like a passing of the torch, from the lean, relentless, brutal action of Cameron’s early films, to the slower, more garish and emotionally open tone of the films which followed (True Lies aside).
The Abyss is the film where Cameron becomes shaggier, less interested in plot - and more interested in sitting in the worlds he has created.
The movie almost plays as the opposite of the Avatar movies in narrative structure, in that the key conflict is ended long before the movie is over.
While the characters have to defuse the bomb, the focus is on Buddy - the literalist - sharing his wife’s belief in protecting the entities in the titular location.
There is something off in the way the characters are written versus the way the actors play them that does not sit right with me.
I feel like I need to give the film another watch.
There is something unfinished about the relationship that I cannot define - there are times where their dynamic comes off as blue collar v remote intellectualism (a familiar theme of Eighties Hollywood).
It is more a conflict between practicality versus idealism, fear of the unknown versus curiosity about the same.
After spending the movie butting up against his wife’s beliefs, it falls to Buddy to convince the aliens not to wipe out humanity.
This movie felt like Cameron doing Spielberg - particularly the Spielberg of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
While the climax does not carry the impact intended, there is something appealing about the film’s faith in the empathy and humanity of ordinary people.
Our protagonists work together and take comfort in, take care of, each other. Meanwhile, Coffey keeps to his own, and is eventually abandoned.
An important film in Cameron’s filmography, The Abyss is the hinge on which his career pivots.
Not only is it influential on the rest of his filmography, it is also - despite its flaws - a fascinating peek into the filmmaker’s worldview.
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