The Abyss (Special Edition) (1989)

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:  ****