Another digression from the Fox DVD set roster: this time, a
film that surely has attained cult-classic, if not classic, status despite
being a box-office bomb when it came out in August of 1989 (small wonder). Its
reevaluation is partially due to its reissue in the 90s as a “Special Edition,”
which restores about 25 minutes of footage originally cut from its original
release; this is the version I am now reviewing.
James Cameron is a director who really knows how to make
your pulse race.
And that’s not just an idle compliment. Cameron has directed
film after film, for a good 15-year stretch, that pushes the viewer like no
filmmaker in recent memory has ever done. He crafts every scene so that they
work, in progressive tandem, to fuse action and suspense without ever letting up. Oh sure, there are a few breaks here and
there to let you catch your breath, and to do a little perfunctory character
developing. But before long, we’re back in the fray, and our sweat has just
dried in time for another round of perspiration.
He does this through sheer talent – a innate sense of where
precisely to put the camera, how exactly to photograph his kinetics and how to
edit it al together for maximum effect. It’s something you take for granted
until you see another director try to do it, and either fail at it or do an
entirely mediocre job. This pretty much describes every action director who
works in current Hollywood.
And another thing – he pumps up his screenplays with as much
antagonism as possible. Sure, it’s easy to do that with the Terminator movies – you just have one
unstoppable automaton from beginning to end. But with something like Titanic, you need more than just Mother
Nature and man’s overzealous folly of engineering, and so Cameron wrote in Cal,
Jack’s foe in his quest for Rose’s heart, and for his life once the big tub
starts to sink. And now here in The
Abyss, he knows that some oil-riggers who find aliens at the bottom of the
ocean just isn’t enough; hence, Lt. Coffey, a deranged Navy Seal who provides
the monkey wrench for our heroes’ best laid plans.
Cameron is so expert as his adrenalization that he gives us
nary a chance to question some of his plot incredulities. For example, why
would the military try to go after a live nuclear submarine in a hurricane? And
what really are the chances they’d draft a ragtag bunch of oil rig workers to
assist the with the operation? And that guy – Lt. Coffey – how likely is it
they’d send a psycho like him on a mission that could precipitate a third world
war if it were to fail? But you know, you just don’t think about stuff like
that in a Cameron movie – somehow he doesn’t give you time to think. And if you do, he throws some dialogue at you that makes
you say, “Oh, okay,” so you can prepare for the next crisis.
But in the long run, it’s not really the plot details that
fuel your long-term investment in an action film; it’s the characters. And Cameron
gives us two of his finest in The Abyss: Virgil
Brigman (Ed Harris), the oil riggers’ foreman and Lindsay Brigman (Mary
Elizabeth Mastrantonio), his estranged wife and designer of the rig (“Deep
Core”). Their performances, and chemistry with each other, play a large part in
why The Abyss thoroughly deserves to
be considered among not only Cameron’s finest works, but of all great sci-fi
thrillers.
Now character development is not one of the director’s
strong suits. His players, particularly his supporting players, tend suffer
from contrivance – and that is indeed the case with The Abyss’s background crew, from the sassy black crewperson to the
quirky rat-toting conspiracy theorist. They could easily have been replaced by
his crew from Aliens and no one
would’ve noticed. And Cameron’s tin-ear for dialogue induced more than groan
from me, particularly in the first hour.
But Cameron casts well – he gets real actors to star, and they tend to be my favorites. (Perhaps he
knows they can make some of his lame lines work.) And getting in Harris and
Mastrontonio for his leads he has suffused his film with an emotional resonance
that his waterbound saga desperately needs. Their heart-wrenching work is a
perfect match for the spine-tingling momentum that Cameron provides as a
director. By the end you’re a blubbering mess, just like you were at the end of
Titanic.
There are two portions in the film that perfectly
demonstrate this. In the first, Virgil and Lindsay have just disposed of Coffey
in their mini-sub when his own vessel tumbles down an undersea trench and
explodes. But their sub starts to flood, and, with only one suit, Lindsay
agrees to “drown” since the water is so cold, hoping the hypothermia will allow
her to be resuscitated. (Again, not sure if this is medically sound, but
Cameron Tells Us To Go Along With It.) From the moment she hysterically gasps
for air as the compartment floods, to the scene in which Virgil frantically
defribulates her over and over and over (longer than we’re comfortable with, but
effective as a result), we are on the edge of our seat with emotional trauma.
And the other scene – just as effective – is essentially the
film’s climax. Virgin plummets lower and lower and lower, into the titular
abyss, with every few hundred feet being an added cause for concern. It gets to
a point where it looks hopeless, until finally – “touchdown!” Virgin defuses
the missile, but hasn’t enough oxygen to return. He knows he can’t make it, and
decides to stay, in an act of self-sacrifice. Need another tissue?
So let me briefly cover the plot, or at least that portion
which I haven’t already covered. Virgil and Lindsay’s undersea oil rig, and all
its crewmen, are asked to join a team of Navy Seals to recover a nuclear
submarine that had sunk after it saw an unidentifiable object. One of the
Seals, a renegade Lt. named Coffey, takes it upon himself to confiscate one of
the sub’s missiles, and to make matters worse, a hurricane destroys the
above-water ship and destroys its crane, sending it plummeting into an ocean
trench, nearly taking the oil rig with it. That trench is popular these days;
it’s where they see some strange, glowing life forms too – the sort of life
form a now fully deranged Coffey wants to kill.
He takes his mini sub to launch his missile into the trench,
but is stopped by Virgin and Lindsay in their own mini-sub. After a sub-battle,
they win, but their damaged vessel quickly floods. She enters hypothermia and
is resuscitated back at the rig; with the human threat removed they must now
contend with mother nature – Virgil volunteers to go down and diffuse that
missile. But he depth becomes too great; he makes it, barely, and cuts the
cord, but sacrificially stays down, knowing he can’t make it back.
Enter: The Aliens. Those glowing beings from before show up
and create a breathing environment for him. No, they can’t talk, but they show
him, with a huge IMAX screen, that they want to destroy humanity, because they
are destroying the planet. (Interesting logic.) So they send huge tidal waves
to do the deed, but stop just short. The reason? They’re mightily impressed by
Virgil’s selfless act. They’ll spare the planet… for now. And they give all the
oil riggers, including Virgil, a free ride back to the surface, no
decompression needed.
I know that a lot of people had some issues with the ending,
and yes, it is heavy handed. And yes, despite some nice early CGI effects, it
is pretty pale Spielberg. But, quite frankly, that’s what gives the whole film its
point – these green boys are down there (and caused the nuke sub accident in
the first place) because they’re pissed off. The edited version, which doesn’t
include the post-apocalyptic warning and only shows that they help him because
they’re impressed with his martyrdom, misses that crucial element of
admonition. I mean, some of the greatest sci-fi classics of all time like The Day the Earth Stood Still, were
laden with moralism. Sometimes ya just gotta lay it on for the greater good.
So, yes, it works as polemic and exhilaration. And Cameron,
despite loving his CGI toybox, has never overused it, except possibly with Avatar. The Abyss, released in 1989, is
all about a real mis en scen. Very few effects, no hovering camera, no food
processor editing. Just solid, hard-camera, storyboarded filmmaking. Gotta love
those days.
Warts and all, The
Abyss is an experience not to be missed. This is what the movies are all
about.
Rating: ****
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