Some guy named Cameron made this. Heard of him?
Perhaps you haven’t yet heard, but a little independent film named Avatar snuck into selected cinemas last month. Once word gets around I hope a few people check it out, as these films need support to justify making more of them.
Anyway the director, an up and comer named James Cameron made a couple other films prior to Avatar, I thought I’d help get the word out by reviewing one of them…
This one is called The Abyss.
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To sum up The Abyss in one sentence: An undersea drilling team are conscripted to search for a sunken US Navy submarine, only they find that and so much more. First off the bat, JC doesn’t do “little” films, so there is a lot more to this film than that.
The rescue team is led by Ed Harris as Bud and includes many unique characters, but in truth none of them exceptionally memorable or even necessary. Upon being informed of their duties they are joined by a team of Navy Seals, this time led by Michael Beihn as Coffey. We realise shortly after that the drillers and the Seals aren’t likely to co-exist peacefully for too long. Adding further fuel to the potential fire is the late inclusion of the designer of the underwater rig Lindsay, played by Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, who also happens to be Ed Harris’s soon to be ex-wife.
After initial decompression the newly forged team investigate the sub, the USS Montana. They find that all crew are already dead, and during the search one of the team suffers convulsions and goes into a coma for some reason, outside the sub Lindsay sees some non-natural looking lights that freak her out a bit.
Meanwhile above water a cyclone hits, the Seals have taken the diving gear to salvage things from the sub so the crew has no choice but to sit it out. Unfortunately the storm causes the flooding of a large area of the rig in which crew members are trapped and drown, and the loss of communication to the outside world. It also nearly drags the rig into a massive abyss near which the sub is located.
But that isn’t what the film is about, the key of The Abyss is when the crew eventually meet the inhabitants of the abyss, everything else is a sideshow. Once contact occurs, Coffey loses touch with reality thinking the alien beings are Russian enemies, and the crew must work out how to survive and somehow get to the surface once more. This all becomes more complicated when Coffey unleashes a nuclear weapon many, many times more powerful than the WW2 A-Bombs, which must be disarmed before anyone thinks about leaving.
For the time the SFX in The Abyss were amazing, which for a Cameron directed film shouldn’t surprise anyone after T2 and now Avatar. But as a film The Abyss is only so-so, there are so many converging plot lines that take things nowhere and if anything lead to a bunch of dead ends and unsatisfying conclusions that you only really remember the water tentacle FX and not much else.
What The Abyss ends up as is an 80 hour build up leading to a 40 minute wrap up and a pretty dumb and hardly mindblowing conclusion, which is I think what Cameron was chasing.
There are several interpersonal issues and conflicts raised over the duration but none of them seem important and indeed none of them are necessary to further the plot, they are simply included as Cameron felt that they must.
Without giving much away (I think), in the finale the aliens show a montage of the bad things that humankind has done to itself and the Earth over the years. I know the aliens must be a very advanced race but did they already have Tivo in 1989? Really?
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Another point: If nothing else this has some James Cameron standards that seem to pop up again and again in his films:
– A bad “establishment” guy that becomes the face of everything naughty about big corporations. (T2, Aliens, The Abyss, Avatar)
– The seemingly obligatory “Squad formation” scene where the troops discuss plot events for viewers. (Aliens, Avatar, The Abyss)
– The big fight between huge manned machines. (Aliens (of course), Avatar, The Abyss)
Final Rating – 6 / 10. Unlike Avatar this is far more a technical achievement than an entertainment one. Too long and basically too little of anything to be memorable. Lucky he seems to have found form.
