The Abyss

Picture it, summer 1989, you got these big action blockbusters that came out like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Lethal Weapon 2 and Batman.  All great and filled with exciting shit.  But there’s one more on your radar that you’ve been itching to check out, The Abyss.  The day comes and you finally see it and are bored and/or confused.

I can’t be the only person that asked himself after watching this thing, “what the fuck?”  At the time people must’ve been caught totally off guard and thought they wandered into the wrong theater.  They would say:

“This is James Cameron?  But he did like The Terminator and Aliens, two of the most awesome ass kicking movies ever.  It’s PG-13 too?  Maybe he just needed to do this picture for whatever personal reasons and it’s out of his system now.”

And at the time that seemed to be the case because Cameron came right back with probably the greatest action film ever made in my opinion, T2 (settle down guys, I know what you’re thinking and Die Hard is number two on my list).  He even did True Lies after that which is a real good and immensely enjoyable, albeit goofy, action flick.  But then of course Titanic changed everything.  It’s easy to see now how The Abyss fits into Cameron’s body of work because of Titanic and Avatar.  I guess he always had that cheesy, lame, uninteresting, rip off side to him but was able to keep it suppressed for a long while.  At the time though, The Abyss must’ve been fucking baffling.

Some minor spoilers but I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you

Ok, I will concede that a lot of the effects look pretty damn good.  The glowing underwater alien ships look the best and are the most impressive.  The water tentacle thing I see as more of a novelty.  It’s not something that’s integral to the story so to me it seemed like more of a demo of this new CGI technology.  As if to say, “check it out guys, pretty cool right?  Well just you wait ‘cause this shit is gonna look fuckin’ bad ass in a couple of years.”  And it did when they used it in T2 and then Jurassic Park.  Who knew back then that this technology would be abused to no end now and CGI would actually make films look worse in most cases.  But anyway, the miniatures, mockups and real life non-CGI shit looks great.

The only other thing that was good in this movie is Michael Biehn (The Terminator, K2).  He plays a menacing Navy Seal that goes insane from being so deep underwater.  I found myself rooting for him because he was the most fascinating person in the cast and I wanted to see how far he was going to take shit.

Overall though, this film is awfully uninteresting.  I don’t dislike the idea of people being trapped in an impossible situation and all they have is their wits to save them.  Alien, Aliens, Die Hard and Jaws are just some of the pictures that share this idea and they’re all fucking fantastic.  I just didn’t care about these characters.  The crew that’s trapped in this underwater rig is straight up Hollywood cheese.  You have the brawny and tough but loveable guy, the geeky annoying but loveable guy that has a small pet of some kind (in this case a rat), the genius woman scientist that’s cold and won’t be bossed around by anyone but loveable, and the not terribly tough no nonsense crew chief that runs a tight ship and is going through a divorce with said woman scientist but loveable.  There are some other guys there too but I don’t think they had personalities or much screen time.  As for those main players, fuck these characters.  I know this was back in 1989 but I’m sick of seeing it man.

I can understand that if you’re making a huge blockbuster having stock characters is part of the game.  Fine.  But as far as all of the alien shit goes, it had me scratching my head.  It would’ve been easier than flicking on a light switch to not have aliens in this movie.  They don’t impact the story at all until the very end and it seems their only purpose was to save Ed Harris’ life (to be clear I saw the theatrical cut and not the director’s cut with all that extra shit about the aliens on the verge of destroying the world).  So why are they there?  It’s so confusing.  They don’t fit into the main plot whatsoever.  Ok fine, they took down (accidentally?) the submarine that gets the ball rolling on this whole rescue mission.  But Cameron could’ve had the sub go down for a number of other reasons that didn’t have to do with aliens.  What if the Russians really were behind it, or the sub just had a catastrophic failure of some kind, or a piece of rock from an ocean crevice came loose and fell on the sub.  You could invent a million different things.  Why introduce aliens and then not have them be essential to the main story?  I don’t fucking get it.

And it’s not just the aliens that don’t make sense to me.  There are a bunch of scenes that start out fine but go on too long and become comical.  Like there’s the crane falling on the underwater rig scene.  It starts out fine with the crew on the rig trying desperately to unhook their connection to the crane on the surface (that’s experiencing a hurricane).  The rig gets dragged along the ocean floor towards a precipice until the crane gives way and falls into the water.  After the crane just misses the underwater rig it then falls off the nearby cliff and almost takes the rig with it.  So you have the dragging, the falling and then more dragging.  It started to get unexciting because it goes on for a long time.  Then there’s the CPR scene where Ed Harris tries for fucking ever to resuscitate Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (The Color of Money, Scarface).  He even slaps her on the face and calls her a bitch.  This is supposed to be a really sad and touching moment because it’s about not giving up and the human spirit triumphing over death.  But when Ed served that slap I laughed out loud.  And when Mastrantonio actually wakes up I thought it was the aliens that did it because she’s dead for like at least five minutes.  This underwater oil rig crew was actually able to bring Mastrantonio back from the dead on their own without magical alien technology and I don’t buy it for a second.  No brain damage or anything?  She’s perfectly fine?  Cameron pushed my suspension of disbelief a little too far.  But I did like later when Ed Harris breaths the oxygenated liquid and tells (actually he types it out ‘cause he can’t speak in the suit) Mastrantonio, “feels weird.  You should try this.”  And she says, “I already have” while everyone laughs nervously ‘cause you know, she like just drowned a couple of minutes ago.  Oh man, what a nasty fuckin’ burn.  Ed must’ve felt pretty shitty after that remark.  Moving on, the mini sub chase is another example of scenes that go on for too long.  These two subs look pretty fragile but they get the shit smashed out of them with no problem.  And it’s not one or two hits, they repeatedly hit the ocean floor and rock walls ‘n shit.  And because they seem indestructible I stopped worrying that anyone would get that hurt during the chase.  The last example I’ll give is the scene where Ed Harris has to descend like miles down into the ocean to retrieve a nuke that Michael Biehn threw down there to blow shit up.  Harris’ descent goes on and on.  His little helper camera sub that I guess is supposed to help him get back up to the rig gets crushed from the pressure like only half way down.  It becomes comical that Ed Harris falls so deep and seems to be relatively ok.

You know, Cameron had a pattern of making two great movies and then one shitty movie starting with The Terminator.  The Abyss was the crappy one in that sequence and the pattern started over with Terminator 2 and ended with Titanic (another water picture).  But he broke that pattern with Avatar and made two bad films in a row.  Couple that with the twelve year gap from Titanic to Avatar and the fact that he’s doing two sequels to Avatar and I’ve concluded that James Cameron will never make another good movie again.  C’est la vie. 

Wrapping up The Abyss, it’s almost like someone dared Cameron to make a Spielberg movie.  And at times this thing does feel pretty Spielbergian but without the charm.  There just isn’t a whole lot to grab a hold of in this film.  There isn’t much meat to sink your teeth into.  I mean it’s not total shit.  It’s just kinda bland and lame.  The only way I find this movie interesting is to think about it in the scope of Cameron’s career.  If you’re into Titanic and/or Avatar you’ll probably like this because it’s the precursor.  This sonuvabitch laid the groundwork.  And in that sense it makes me dislike the picture even more.  If it was a one off it would be way more fascinating to dissect.  And I guess you can do that by trying to get into the mind of James Cameron at that time (there must have been so many people shaking their heads after watching this).  But because we all know now that he loves telling corny, trite ass action and love stories (which is half of his resume now) I look at it more as just another one of those.