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The Abyss (1989) Weighing in at $ 50 million and up, The Abyss,
writer-director James Cameron's follow-up to The
Terminator and Aliens,
is by far the most substantial of the current school of underwater action
movies. It gets things right at the outset with the pre-credits ping
of a sonar, and then sets up its plot marvellously as a nuclear submarine
is bumped by something unidentified and lodged on an undersea ledge.
The navy hire deep-sea oil engineer Bud Brigman (Ed Harris) and his
estranged wife Lindsey (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), who designed the
submarine rig Bud captains, to go down into the abyss and check out
the sub for survivors. To complicate things, they get landed with Lieutenant
Coffey (Biehn), a paranoid who reacts badly to the extreme depth and
has to calm his shaking hands by carving chunks out of his arm. Mysterious
creatures float around the submarine, and Lindsey thinks they represent
a Non-Terrestrial Intelligence. Coffey, however, who has picked up a
handy nuclear warhead from the downed ship, thinks they're filthy commies
and, in between ranting and panicking, plots to give the ETs a big hot
hello. For its first two hours or so, The Abyss
is absolutely great action man stuff, capitalising on everybody's fear
of the deep and dark. Shot under impossibly gruelling conditions, it
is a damp, claustrophobic widescreen movie, full of frail people straining
with thick iron bulkheads or being crushed by tons of rushing water
as their tincans rupture. There is one absolutely magical alien special
effect involving a seawater pseudopod that explores the rig, but the
main business of the film is (unbearable suspense. The film keeps tossing
new problems at its heroes, and Cameron really punishes his cast as
the dramatic contrivances pile up - at one point, the hero has to deal
with his marital crisis, a raving (psychotic waving an atom bomb, a
topside hurricane, possibly threatening space creatures, a leaky submarine,
extreme cold, a diminishing oxygen supply, failing electricity and premature
baldness all at the same time. I think I chewed off three of my fingers
during the protracted, emotionally draining sequence - which happens
to be the best dramatic excuse for getting some naked breasts on screen
that I've ever seen - in which Bud tries to shock his wife out of a
shock-induced coma. Weirdly, the film's problem is that it revs up the
tension so much (that, like one character's submersible sinking into
the high pressure of the titular Abyss, it finally bursts. The climax,
as Bud - who, in a truly squirm-inducing twist, has to drown himself
in an oxygenated fluid in order to breathe in the deeps - descends to
defuse the nuke and meet the aliens, just doesn't work. The inevitable
reconciliation with Lindsey and the choked-through-tears communications
when it seems one or both of the lovers is going to die simply provoke
laughter, and the awe-inspiring special effects finish rings hollow
because, as nowhere else in this or any previous Cameron film, things
turn out to be better than they seem. Cameron's strongest suit as a
film-maker is his hitherto unshakable belief in the essential malevolence
of the universe and the consequent resilience of his heroes and heroines,
but here he turns soppy at the end. However, that flaw aside, this is
top-notch excitement. First Published In: The Good Times Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com
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