It’s hard to call James Cameron’s movies a guilty pleasure. The guy may churn hits like butter, but they’re almost always astonishingly well-paced, intense, and smart as hell. Cameron’s most recent hit was Titanic. It made him more money than he’d ever dreamed, but it’s also the only one of his major releases that I’ve seen just once. I like his Terminator flicks as much as the next guy. I think that Aliens is probably one of the five best sequels ever filmed. I think that True Lies is underrated and brilliant, and represents Hollywood’s best use of Tom Arnold, ever. Cameron makes smart, accessible, popular movies.

And not one of them is half as good as The Abyss.

Here’s something surprising about this movie: it tanked at the box office. It made about fifteen million less than it cost to make. Rentals pushed it into profitability eventually, but this movie, for a time, represented a (purely financial) low mark in James Cameron’s career. Excluding his documentaries and his first movie (Piranha II: The Spawning, which can’t really be called ‘his’ movie), not one of his feature films has failed to kick ass in theatres.

Cameron’s movies are often dismissed as action flicks, but that’s a misperception. Each of his films has an intelligent core that the action is built around. Cameron is at heart a storyteller; and like other popular storytellers, like Steven Spielberg or Robert Zemeckis, Cameron understands what excites people. The heart of The Abyss is a love story — a love story wrapped in a survival tale wrapped in a thriller.

The story’s very simple: A nuclear submarine has gone missing. The U.S. Navy goes looking for it, and recruits the crew of a deep-sea oil rig to assist them in tracking down the sub. The goal: to retrieve the sub’s warheads — and rescue any survivors — before somebody else finds it. And that’s all there is to it.

Except, of course, that’s not all there is to it. The Seals catch a ride down to the rig with Lindsey Brigman (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio). She’s the engineer who designed Deepcore (the rig), and since she knows more about it than just about anybody, she’s been called in to supervise the non-military side of the rescue effort. On Deepcore, her soon-to-be ex-husband, Bud (Ed Harris), is busting his ass day in and out as the crew’s foreman. He isn’t thrilled about uprooting the rig to go sub-hunting (his crew isn’t qualified for this sort of thing), but more than that, he’s supremely pissed that Lindsey’s coming aboard.

Bud: “God, I hate that bitch.”

Hippy: “Probably shouldn’t have married her then, huh?”

The mission is complicated in three ways: by the Seals first, whose official mission has a sinister ulterior motive; by Hurricane Fredrick, which has severed Deepcore’s communications with the surface; and, most dramatically, by a close encounter that Lindsey has while outside the rig, preparing it for detachment from the ocean floor. The encounter takes place on the brink of an underwater cliff; something glowing and beautiful and completely impossible to explain rises from the depths to meet Lindsey as she’s working. She is, in the great tradition of movie ‘encounters’, the only person to witness this.

Lindsey: “There is something down there. Something not us.”

Catfish: “You could be more specific.”

Lindsey: “Not us. Not human. Get it? Something non-human, but intelligent. A non-terrestrial intelligence.”

Hippy: “A non-terrestrial intelligence? NTIs! Oh, man, that’s better than UFOs. Oh, but that works too, huh? ‘Underwater flying objects’.”

The movie is of course packed with action, but it also includes a couple of moments that’ll make the beefiest guy sniff self-consciously. (Warning: If you haven’t seen the movie, this paragraph will spoil some of it for you.) The first of these is probably the movie’s most classic scene: After a tense battle between the Seal-in-charge and the still-married Brigmans, Bud and Lindsey find themselves trapped in a submersible vehicle. They’re a good distance from the safety of Deepcore, their vehicle is filling up with freezing water, and they have just one set of diving gear. Lindsey forces Bud to take the gear.

Lindsey: “You’ve got the suit on, and you’re a much better swimmer than I am, right?”

Bud: “Yeah, maybe, but –”

Lindsey: “Right? Yes. I’ve got a plan.”

Bud: “What plan?”

Lindsey: “I drown, you tow me back to the rig.”

Bud fights, but knows she’s right. He puts his dive helmet on, and the sub fills up with water. Seeing him forced to watch helplessly as his wife drowns in front of him is heartbreaking. He swims back to Deepcore, pulling her body behind him, and radios ahead for his crew to break out the first aid. Once back aboard the rig, Bud desperately performs CPR while his crewmates try to break the news to him. It’s a powerful scene that caps off the growing discovery that Bud and Lindsey are still in love.

The second of the scenes is my favorite part of the movie. The battle I mentioned above resulted in the loss of the nuclear warhead, which has tumbled into the trench. With both submersible vehicles out of commission, there’s only one way to reach the nuke. The Seals outfit Bud with a deep-sea diving suit filled with breathable fluid, and he descends the underwater cliff alone. Since the fluid requires twice as much effort to breathe as oxygen, and prevents him from talking, his only connection to Deepcore a small keypad strapped to one wrist. As he descends, he responds to radio messages from Deepcore by punching in his replies; the deeper he goes, the more disoriented he becomes. His messages become less and less clear, until they’re almost indecipherable. Lindsey talks softly in his ear as he plummets, a tiny spark of light farther below the surface of the ocean than any man has ever gone. It’s a terrifically lonely scene.

Monk: “Bud, give me a reading of your liquid oxygen gauge.”

Bud (typing, disoriented): 5 minuts worth

Lindsey (frantic): “Bud, do you hear me? You drop your weights and start back now! Bud! That gauge could be wrong! Do you hear me? Drop your weights and start back now! Your gauge could be wrong, your gauge could be wrong… You drop your weights and start back now!”

Bud (typing): going to stay a while

Lindsey: “No, you won’t stay there, do you hear me? You drop your weights, you can breathe shallow, do you hear me? Bud, please listen to me, please… you can’t leave me here alone now! Oh god, Virgil, please…”

Bud (typing): dont cry baby. knew this was one way ticket but you know i had to come.

The movie is, in the Cameron tradition, populated with entertaining characters. Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio are terrific here; this is one of the best roles Harris has ever had, and that’s saying something. Michael Biehn plays John Coffey, the head Seal; as the movie wears on, he gets to chew more and more scenery as his sickness-induced paranoia grows. (This is one of Biehn’s better roles, and certainly the best of his three appearances in Cameron’s films. The studio lobbied hard to get him nominated for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, but was unsuccessful.) The actors who portray Deepcore’s crew are also quite good, particularly Leo Burmester (Catfish), who plays Bud’s wingman.

The story of the making of the movie is almost as interesting as the movie itself. Because special effects could not effectively create the undersea environment that Cameron desired, he convinced 20th Century Fox to let him shoot underwater. The movie was filmed in the abandoned, half-completed reactor cooling tanks of an unfinished nuclear power station in South Carolina. It ended up being a traumatic shoot for many of the cast and crew; Ed Harris nearly drowned during his deep dive scene, and that he and Cameron clashed quite frequently during filming. Mastrantonio’s rescue and resuscitation scene were reportedly so difficult and painful that she stormed off of the set. In one scene, a Navy Seal uses a live rat to demonstrate the liquid oxygen solution that Bud will breathe during his dive. The scene is real: the rat was really submerged in the solution, and its struggle to breathe isn’t faked. The American Humane Association censored the movie for this scene, despite the rat being demonstrably unharmed; in England the scene was clipped from the film and replaced by dialogue describing the rat’s reaction.

It’s certainly possible to review the movie without mentioning the paranormal elements or even the special effects (which the filmmakers won the Oscar for in 1990), an observation that goes a long way towards reaffirming what I mentioned before: that Cameron’s films are not all whiz-bang shoot-em-ups, but big movies about small stories. The director is responsible for some of the best popular science fiction movies of the last twenty years, but this is without question his masterpiece, and one of my favorite movies.

Then again, he’s far from finished. I suspect he’s got another classic or two in him yet.

Friday, June 9, 2006   

1. Suebob wrote:
   June 12th, 2006 at 7:25 am

   This is only marginally related, but have you seen the Titanic2 Trailer over at YouTube yet? I fear it could happen.

2. Jg wrote:
   June 12th, 2006 at 6:36 pm

   Yep, I saw it. I think I posted it in the Shallow End a couple of weeks ago. Creepy shit, eh?

the blog and design portfolio of Jason Gurley. (Learn more.) This site has been around since 1998; me, since 1978. In 2005 I drove 3,000 miles to see a movie. 2009 is pretty aimless so far, but I'm sure I'll get around to something sooner or later.

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