The Abyss Movie Reviews

James Camermon, a masterpiece. I loved this movie. It's got so much appeal and intricate cast and dynamics. Cameron knows how to make movies. He mas made many movies but there's something about the Abyss that truly sticks out and makes it an Oscar film. No one could have done it better. A lot had to go into making this movie. In my opinion, it's the greatest under water movie ever made.

The Abyss, has got a great start to a three hour movie. I don't think it could have been any shorter, because so much had to be interwoven into the various parts of the movie. Cameron has done a superb job in making a movie beat Box Office sales and expectations.

Under water. I was drawn to the scene of an American underwater nuclear submarine. They encounter an alien species hiding deep in the ocean depths of the Marianna Trench. Lieutenant Coffee was excellent in his acting parts and scenes. The story unfolds. You learn of a strange, alien, mysterious force that nobody woud believe if you shared this experience . unless you had proof.

I was capitaved and drawn into the first scene and could not stop watching the movie. The newclear submarine. You are drawn into the movie. James Cameron also directed the movie Titantic which was release in 1997. This movie, The Abyss, was released in the year 1989. It's a movie, I am sure you will enjoy and be delighted to watch.

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Anyone looking for a discouraging word about this stupendously exciting and emotionally engulfing film should read no further. The Abyss confirms James Cameron as a world-class filmmaker. Granted, he started out in 1981 by directing Piranha II: The Spawning; four years later, he even helped perpetrate the screenplay of Rambo: First Blood Part II. Granted, these are capital offenses. But hold your ire.

Consider The Terminator(1984), the violent masterpiece Cameron directed from a screenplay he wrote with producer Gale Anne Hurd about a killer cyborg(Arnold Schwarzenegger) from the twenty-first century. The Cameron-Hurd duo, by then husband and wife, next teamed on Aliens(1986), the sequel that received seven Oscar nominations and outgrossed its predecessor.

Cameron and Hurd, no longer wed but still working together, now have devised their most ambitious project. The Abyss, with a budget topping$40 million, is many terrific things: the greatest underwater adventure ever filmed, the most consistently enthralling of the summer blockbusters, one of the best pictures of the year. It's also something even more unexpected: a love story of shattering impact. Those who have written off Cameron as a whiz at hard action, hardware and little else should whet their palate for a feast of crow.

Some may insist on reading The Abyss as veiled autobiography. Like Cameron and Hurd, the film's two major characters met on the job, married and then split due to the stress of combining work and wedlock. Ed Harris is Bud Brigman, the rig foreman on a civilian underwater oil-drilling facility called Deepcore. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio is Lindsey, Deepcore's project engineer, boss lady and soon-to-be-former Mrs. Brigman. Cameron clearly knows from experience how shared labor can heat or chill a relationship. But The Abyss extends far beyond the parameters of his personal life.

Cameron wrote a short story called "The Abyss" when he was seventeen, and the finished film retains traces of youthful innocence in its straight-on treatment of such verities as love, honor, duty, faith in a superior force and hope for a better day. Admirers of the dark and sinister Aliens and The Terminator may worry that gonzo Cameron has wimped out. Hardly. Though The Abyss is his most positive film, he hasn't turned Pollyanna. In this pressure cooker beneath the sea, he has created a microcosm in which each character's capacity for good and evil is tested. The effect is relentlessly unnerving.

The film begins when a mysterious force sends a nuclear submarine to a watery grave in the Caribbean at the edge of a trench leading down into four miles of cold, inky creepiness. The navy, knowing the missiles on board the sub possess five times the power of the bomb that decimated Hiroshima, sends a four-man SEAL(Sea, Air and Land) team - headed by Lieutenant Coffey(Michael Biehn) - to clean up the mess.

That's when Deepcore's corporate owners volunteer the rig and its nine-person crew to aid the naval rescue operation. Above water, there's a hurricane brewing. Below, the clash of egos proves even more threatening. Lindsey, living up to her rep as hell on wheels, is determined not to let Bud run her operation into ruin on a government goose chase. Coffey, showing signs of a nervous disorder due to decompression, resents Lindsey's interference in top-secret affairs.

Cameron is uncannily successful at creating a mounting feeling of claustrophobia. Some scenes, like the one in which the divers move through the stricken sub as drowned bodies float by in an eerie mockery of death, have a tragic beauty. Others, such as Bud's towing an unconscious Lindsey in a lung-bursting swim to safety, could reduce an audience to raw panic. Even the first sighting of an NTI(Nonterrestrial Intelligence) skirts Spielbergian sentimentality to achieve a quiet sense of wonder.

Cameron and a superb technical staff excel at making the fantastical look real. To turn The Abyss into an experience like no other, Cameron took an abandoned nuclear-reactor containment building in South Carolina, filled it with 7.5 million gallons of water and had his cast and some of the crew trained to dive. Then he tossed the lot of them into the drink at depths of up to fifty-five feet. Underwater films are often shot on a sound stage, with smoke and light giving the effect of submersion while actors muck about in fake slow motion. Not this time. What you see and hear in The Abyss has a you-are-there immediacy that makes other undersea films look hopelessly hokey. This is monumental, mold-breaking entertainment.

Despite Cameron's elaborate technical setup, it's the human drama of The Abyss that carries the show. Even the smallest performances are idiosyncratic and memorable. Todd Graff's Hippy, Leo Burmester's Catfish and Kimberly Scott's One Night deserve special praise, as does a white rat named Beany who performs beyond the call of duty in a liquid-oxygen breathing sequence that is one of the film's scariest moments.

The three leads are outstanding. Biehn makes us feel compassion for the lethal Coffey, led astray by his twisted sense of duty. Harris has never been better or more appealing, bringing nuance, humor and gravity to the role of the blue-collar hero who'd risk his life faster than risk exposing his feelings. Still, the movie belongs to Mastrantonio. In a summer dominated by male action heroes, she has the strongest woman's role and instills it with beauty, brains and a spiky wit that rank her with the top actresses of her generation; she is mesmerizing and indelibly moving.

Cameron may have fashioned his film out of familiar parts, but he's put them together in a way that demands fresh attention and respect. There's poetry in the images; The Abyss is pulp transcended. With probing intelligence and passionate feeling, Cameron has raised the adventure film very close to the level of art.

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The Abyss is my most favorite movie, partly because James Cameron is my favorite director, but more than that it is the sheer awe that the world of the film creates which is greatly more impressive than many other sci-fi thrillers that have followed it. Although the director may be more famous for the technical achievement of ''Titanic'' and the action of ''The Terminator Series'' but this movie is simply unmatched in its quality.

The story revolves around a team of underwater oil drillers(lead by Ed Harris in a riveting performance) that finds out that their rig needs to be used by the Navy to run a mission to investigate the sinking of a U.S. submarine. What first seems like a pretty routine mission begins going very wrong, very quickly as nuclear warheads rescued from the sunken sub become part of the equasion. While the team is underwater, a strange being makes its presence known and one by one, the team begins to believe that they are not alone.

Although this was a very tough production, James Cameron did a phenomenal job under those conditions. I loved ''Titanic'', and I praise James Cameron for what he was able to accomplish with that film(and he's a brave guy for wanting to go back into the water after the problems of this production), but for some reason I simply find ''The Abyss'' more entertaining. Once the film really begins to get intense, the tension that the film builds is enormous - and it's because we care about these people. These are great performances. This is a gigantic picture for its time, and the and its performance is excellent.

The underwater photography by Mikael Solomon (director of ''Hard Rain'') is spectacular. THE ABYSS is a film with a dominant blue tint and those portions of the photography come off the best. It is handled remarkably well and makes the underwater footage look great. It has a claustrophobic look overall.

The sound design is absolutely fantastic on ''The Abyss'' creating a full-throttle ride during some of the more intense action sequences. Surround use is frequent and effective, as well, bringing the viewer even further into the underwater environment. There are also many instances of deep, strong bass. Give particular attention to the scene when the crane breaks away from the Benthic Explorer. The sound of the mechanics of the rig put you right there.

Set Design is excellent. The special effects, which now seem dated, were pioneering at that time. The alien effects are superb. Another integral part of the film is the awesome score by Alan Silvestri. His use of the chorals is simply brilliant and gives an ecclesiastical feel to the music.The score is rich and heightens the experience.

But the film belongs to James Cameron, you can never imagine this film being made by any other person, save him. He is the man! Dive into ''The Abyss''

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This is the film where a new special effects computer company showed the world what could be done. Industrial Light and Magic using a Toaster (not that sort of Toaster but a special computer based on the Amiga) and Lightwave software startled the world with their creativity. Considering that it was 1990 the effects were truly magic. People may forget the plot but surely they will always remember when a finger of water confronts the heroine and morphs into a replica of her face. A truly stunning piece of imagery.

Instead of going into outer space to confront aliens we go down into the depths of the ocean with no idea that an alien race lives in such an unfriendly environment.

A massive, underwater, mobile platform is the setting for this sci fi adventure that is enlisted by the US military (who else?) to aid the recovery of a submarine. To this end the sea bed habitat is reinforced by the arrival of a group of navy Seals, the human variety not the oink! oink! flipper clapping, ball balancing on the nose kind.

A storm topside creates havoc and a huge crane and its associated paraphernalia tumbles to the sea bed creating mayhem down there. Being science fiction then anything goes but surviving the huge pressure at the bottom of the sea by breathing water does stretch credulity to the limit. But the scene where the hero and heroine are trapped in a rapidly filling vessel with only one set of breathing gear between them borders on the possible. She opts to drowning whilst he using the sole breathing gear pulls her to the safety of the habitat to be resuscitated. A novel concept that could work in real life although I wouldn't volunteer to be the guinea pig.

Abyss made a change from the usual sci fi stories that abound our screens and was enjoyable to watch which made the three hours seem less.

We had the usual American Army (Seals) flexing their muscles in an attempt to get the better of the aliens and failing but then that is par for the American course. Korea, Vietnam.

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I remember this film quite well, because this film heralded the arrival of Dolby sound in Mumbai at Sterling theatre. I remember us enjoying all the sounds int the film, be it the bubbles escapin into the air ot the other sounds. The film is about an underwater survey team, that gets disconnected from its mother ship during a storm. A lot of events follow, including the presence of a psychotic marine, a nuclear warhead, that slips out, to add more twist to the tale. But the film wasn't much about the tale as such. It was the marvelous special effects that really kept me glued to the seat. Scenes where the alien visits the ship, the storms and the huge tidal waves shown approaching the shores of america, the creatures shown in the spaceship .

And of course, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio who looked gorgeous as ever. The performances were good too.

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