The Abyss 1989, Rated R

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Starring Ed Harris, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, et al.

Occasionally, I will exaggerate a little for the sake of humor. You cannot imagine what serious responses I received for stating that James Cameron's Titanic earned approximately "9 billion dollars" in the state of Rhode Island. So I feel it necessary to preface my next statement with this sentence: what I am about to tell you is true. One sure indicator of how technical a film is, and how long, painful, and grueling a shoot was, is how long that film's credits are. The credits to director Robert Rodriguez's films last for about a minute, tops, while James Cameron's films, like the The Abyss, tend to last for a while longer. In the case of The Abyss, I watched a good 30 seconds of the credits, answered a phone call, decided to do a laundry, took my clothes into my basement, put them into the washing machine, fixed myself a sandwich, ate it while reading the Tribune comics, returned to my living room and saw that The Abyss' credits hadn't even reached the cast listing yet.

Written and directed by James Cameron, The Abyss is, when you cut away all the pretenses, a movie about a big hole. Of course, that big hole is in the bottom of the Caribbean Sea and a heretofore unknown species of alien creatures that can control the water are living at the bottom of the hole, but these are minor points. Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio star as a bickering, separated husband/wife couple Bud and Lindsay Brigman (this marriage could well have been modeled after one of Cameron's own three failed marriages), who are on the bottom of the sea in an underwater oil rig, near the big hole. They working in conjunction with the navy and a SEAL team to locate and recover a downed U.S. nuclear submarine in the vicinity.

The plotting of The Abyss, like that of Cameron's other films (Predator, The Terminator), is rather weak when there aren't mind blowing special effects and action sequences taking place on screen. Fortunately, there aren't many of these moments in The Abyss' 140 minute running time. The visual effects, for which The Abyss was nominated for an Academy Award, are stunning, and the underwater footage, of which there is a great deal, is superbly shot. The sets were spectacularly well constructed and Cameron's sense of action and terror first rate.

Cameron, has a reputation among his peers for being extremely hard to deal with--I can only imagine what it would have been like to work with him under water--but also has his colleagues utmost respect for the cinematic techniques he has both created and mastered. One of these directorial techniques at which Cameron is particularly gifted is in relaying the underlying sense of danger. Setting this story 2,000 feet below the sea's surface only heightens this urgency and tension.

Harris and Mastrantonio deliver solid performances, but, like the rest of the humans in The Abyss, have their scenes stolen by the amazing camera work and special effects Cameron produced. On paper, this film doesn't look like much, but on screen, where it matters, The Abyss is a ride. Buckle up, take a deep breath, and hang on.