--Lindsey Brigman, The Abyss
James Cameron's best film is not The Abyss. Though The Abyss never reaches the same thematic or artistic heights as something like Terminator 2 or Aliens, it does possess its own successes as a story, keeping some of the stylistic and genre touches Cameron has associated himself with even as its setting distinguishes it from his other work. In fact, few mainstream science fiction movies truly explore the idea of an underwater civilization (Aquaman and Underwater are two of the more recent ones). This gives The Abyss, especially at its time, a special stage from which to show its characters and events. It balances a story of alien contact (although there is no reason to think the species discovered truly is extraterrestrial, unlike what a character says), one of reconciliation between lovers, and one of political tension, mostly doing a great job of this across its more than two hour runtime.
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| Photo credit: Mind on Fire Photography on VisualHunt.com |
Production Values
As with some of Cameron's other work like Terminator 2, the digital effects in The Abyss look outdated by comparison to the CGI of modern norms, but they are still far better examples of what older effects could look like than those of something like Predator, which came out only two years earlier. The scene where the creatures use water that can mimic people's faces and stretch its "neck" across many rooms demonstrates this well. The physical sets are a great contrast to this because they unsurprisingly look just as natural as they would have in 1989. No matter how much CGI evolves, practical effects and locations will usually not look as old as digital effects from more than 30 years ago!
The acting and characterization, like the sets, hold up due to their strong quality. Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio play an estranged couple that together forms the emotional core of the story--and in which the deepest characterization of the movie is on display. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio's Lindsey is also notably not a personality clone of Cameron's Sarah Connor or his take on Ellen Ripley. She, like the other primary characters, are not unnecessarily made to resemble the characters of other Cameron films. Michael Biehn, who collaborated with James Cameron in an even more popular film of his, has a very different role than he does in Aliens and Terminator. His Hiram Coffey is actually the villain of the story instead of a non-human foe, and Biehn shows versatility as an actor by skillfully playing a different kind of character in the movie.
Story
Some spoilers are below.
An American submarine encounters an unidentified submerged object, or USO, traveling at such high speeds that its passing forces the submarine into a collision with rocks. Trying to recover a nuclear missile, a team of government operatives create tension on an underwater drilling station as a hurricane threatens the surface above and a strange species of aquatic beings are spotted again and again. A still-married but emotionally detached wife and husband have to work together amidst all of this. The wife, Dr. Lindsey Brigman, is one of the persons who sees the bizarre underwater species, which tend to trigger a power blackout every time they appear.
Intellectual Content
For a movie that is supposed to partly be about contacting an alien species, The Abyss does a terrible job of establishing that the underwater beings encountered are actually extraterrestrials. What is does a great job of when it comes to this issue is instead exemplifying how it is objectively impossible to tell that a being is from Earth or another planet just because it was previously unknown or because it looks different from familiar terrestrial creatures. Lindsey just assumes that the creatures are "nonterrestrial" even though seeing an underwater creature on Earth does not prove that it comes from Earth or from a foreign planet. As basic rationalistic reflection reveals, the inherent limitations of sensory perceptions and the objective logical possibility of a given newly being coming from either Earth or somewhere else mean that Lindsey's idea is just rooted in irrationality.
Conclusion
The Abyss, although it blends multiple things like mysterious aliens and political paranoia very well, is at its best when focusing on its characters--that being one of James Cameron's strengths as a director. The themes are not developed as thoroughly as its characters, unlike how they are explored alongside the cast in Cameron's Terminator films, but so much is handled well that the less prominent philosophical themes about the epistemology of alien life and the destructiveness of war are not a detriment, but an opportunity that is simply exploited to a lesser extent. This is still a unique movie with strong performances and a setting conducive to the isolation, desperation, and mystery called for. It is not the best from its director, but that does not make it bad.
Content:
1. Violence: A brawl is shown in one scene without gore.
2. Profanity: "Bitch," "damn," and "shit" are used.
3. Nudity: A woman's breasts are briefly uncovered so she can be revived after being unconscious in the ocean.
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