The Abyss

1989's "The Abyss" by James Cameron.

Starring Ed Harris, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Michael Biehn, and the immortal Chris Elliot. 

Starting to explore his fascination (obsession?) with deep sea diving/exploration, James Cameron's third real film, "tA", is absolutely Cameronian in it's ambition. To open, we see a submarine deep at sea, that has technical issues that cause it to crash. A ragtag oil rig team (Harris, Mastrantonio, et al) and a trio of marines (Biehn, et al) are recruited to go down to a underwater station, where they can cast off to explore what has happened way below. It is revealed (however awkwardly by Cameron's trademark painful expositional dialogue), that Harris and Mastrantonio are married, but are in the process of separation. While they engage in some of the most claustrophobic couple's counselling ever seen, Harris leads his roughneck crew through the process of yet another job that becomes anything but. While the oil riggers prepare to figure out what happened to the sub, we learn 2 things: that not only do the marines have an ulterior motive to the deep sea exploration, but that 1 of them may be suffering a type of pressurization sickness that makes them mentally unstable. As these screws tighten, we see a tropical storm raging at the top of the ocean, blinding the crew to communication and direction from above, cutting off their means of escape, and creating several time sensitive oxygen sensitive/flooding scenarios from the ensuing damage.

Cameron, whom I would love to be a fly on the wall for any of his productions more than any other director (living or dead), reportedly put his cast through hell, flooding an abandoned nuclear reactor and immersing the actors in water for 12 hours a day. The results, in typical Cameron fashion, lead to actors with hypothermia and bitter feelings, but environments that feel worked and lived in by assorted roughnecks, and performances that don't very much feel like acting so much as factual reporting. It's very difficult to not believe somebody is freezing when they are wet and blue, and tough not to feel their desperation, when they're fighting for their lives with a pressurization sickness afflicted trained killer. Regardless, in the best way possible, Cameron is a essentially a theme park scientist, as he has continued to prove throughout his career. While never much of a wordsmith, with "The Terminator" and "Aliens" in his belt ("Piranha 2" may have fell off of the ol' CV), he really went for broke with "tA".  As the above noted plot points indicate, Cameron keeps the audience continuously on the edge of their seat, with a drowning always around the corner, pressurization an ongoing issue, and tensions between conflicting viewpoints. The movie would be rewarded with an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.
Cameron would also continue his career long theme of especially strong heroines. After watching Linda Hamilton slowly grow a set for "tT", and Signourney Weaver then teaching marines how much hairier and heavier her balls were and how to use them to kill extra terrestrials in "Aliens" (leading to likely the first and only Academy Award nomination for best actress in an action film), here Mastrantonio follows suit by regularly showing up and showing the rest of the crew who's boss (spoiler alert: she is).

Finally, while a technical craftsperson of cinematic theme parks who loves his strong women (before marrying and divorcing them), what is notable about Cameron's "tA" is how personal it is. It is his "Close Encounters of a Third Kind", a quest to look into the existential wonder of what extraterrestrial contact could look like- and a personal philosophical explanation into why they would come at all. Remarkably, Cameron uses the setting of the ocean, not outer space to explore these themes. Based off of film's usual explorations of underwater, usually the tropes mined are horror (sharks! Monsters aboard!) or war movies (subs!). But Cameron reserves the ocean's dark and murky depths (they don't call it "The Abyss" for nothing) as a source of mysterious wonder, a gestating pool for mankind's next evolutionary leap forwards. It is this level of personalization, that makes "tA" stick in my head. As we watch footage of a drowning crew member attempting to save his pet rat, is it possible we understand a little more about the earth being a worthwhile place for visiting?

4/5

Trailer :   Click Here.