Starring: Ed Harris, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Michael Biehn, Leo Burmester, Todd Graff Directed By: James Cameron Average Rating: Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested) Binding: DVD Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Letterboxed, Special Edition, Widescreen, NTSC Label: 20th Century Fox Number of Items: 1 Region Code: 1 Release Date: February 11, 2003 Running Time: 138 minutes Theatrical Release Date: August 09, 1989
Description: A civilian oil rig crew is recruited to conduct a search and rescue effort when a nuclear submarine mysteriously sinks. One diver (Ed Harris) soon finds himself on a spectacular odyssey 25,000 feet below the ocean's surface where he confronts a mysterious force that has the power to change the world or destroy it. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and Michael Biehn co-star.
Amazon.com essential video: Meticulously crafted but also ponderous and predictable, James Cameron's 1989 deep-sea close-encounter epic reaffirms one of the oldest first principles of cinema: everything moves a lot more slowly underwater. Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, as formerly married petroleum engineers who still have some "issues" to work out, are drafted to assist a gung-ho Navy SEAL (Michael Biehn) with a top-secret recovery operation: a nuclear sub has been ambushed and sunk, under mysterious circumstances, in some of the deepest waters on earth, and the petro-techies have the only submersible craft capable of diving down that far. Every image and every performance is painstakingly sharp and detailed (and the computerized water creatures are lovely) but the movie's lumbering pace is ultimately lethal. It's the audience that ends up feeling waterlogged. For a guy who likes guns as much as Cameron (his next film after all, was the body-count masterpiece Terminator 2: Judgment Day), it's interesting that the moral balance here is weighted heavily in favor of the can-do engineers; the military types are end-justifies-the-means amoralists, just like the weasely government bureaucrats in Aliens. --David Chute
Fantastic The Abyss is a wonderful movie. If you like suspense, and sitting on pins and needles then you need to see this movie.
Wrong format - screen Again, this movie is on the wrong format. Theback cover show widescreen, but not. Still it is 4:3. A great movie, but todays standards are not acceptable. Do not buy it, until "another" new edition will come with true 16:9.
Cheesy and Stale Abyss / B00005V9IL
*Spoilers*
I really cannot understand how this movie can have an average 4 star rating, and that after *most* of the 1 star reviews have to do with the formatting of the Special Edition and not with the actual content. I realize that 80's movies have to be held to a different standard than current movies, but having watched this for the first time a few days ago, I was blown away by how incredibly cheesy the writing for this movie is. I'm afraid, however, that this review may not win me any friends, but here goes.
When an United States military submarine is distracted by an impossibly quick moving object under the sea, and a mysterious, yet brief power outage that accompanies the sighting, the submarine instantly plows into an underwater wall with disastrous results. This doesn't really make much sense as the power outage is brief enough that it should not have caused the sub to barrel into the undersea wall as directly as it did, but just flow with it. The military isn't too keen on abandoning the potential survivors and the nuclear warheads the submarine was carrying, so a search-and-rescue-and-salvage operation is in order. Unfortunately, they are on a tight time schedule, what with the hurricane coming it all full speed, so it's time to call in the obligatory civilians.
Ed Harris and crew are under-the-sea in their cozy little research station. They are comfortably redneck (everyone in the cast would be equally comfortable with the crew in Armageddon) and they make cute quips like "I really hate that bitch," rejoindered by, "Well, you should have thought about that before you married her." Hahaha. A group of Navy Seals are sent down and they loudly and confidently assure everyone that none of them are going to "freak out", which is really subtle foreshadowing for when one of them immediately begins showing signs of freaking out. For plot purposes, none of the highly trained Seals *or* the civilian operators notice the signs of freak out, despite a litany of physical symptoms.
The crew begins the salvage operation and immediately balks at the creepy dead bodies floating all over the place. When one of the civilians becomes comatose, they trek back to the underwater base and forget about looking for survivors, because there weren't any in the first few rooms and the movie needs to move forward. The Seals are convinced that the swiftly moving underwater light source they've seen is some kind of Russian device, so the mission is escalated and the Seals recover a nuclear warhead in case they need to blow something up. (With an amusing scene in which we find that the "how to disable a nuclear warhead to take it home with you" instructions are *only* marked "Secret" and not one of the higher levels of classification in the military. Maybe things were different in the 80's.)
The underwater station is now in a lot of trouble because the ship above is being tossed badly by the hurricane and the tubes connecting the ship to the base are pulling the base about. When the ship equipment detaches entirely and pulls the base every which way across the ocean floor, there is a ham-fisted scene where Ed Harris' wedding ring (the one he almost discarded!) saves his life. The equipment is eventually thrown over the edge of a deep ocean chasm, which made me concerned that the base would get dragged into the chasm as well, but it doesn't, apparently because we're done with that part of the movie and can move on now.
The resident Bitchy Female Scientist (BFS) testily announces that they are going to die of suffocation or of heat deprivation long before the above ship can save them. Take note of this information, because it will *never* be mentioned within the movie again - once the alien sightings begin, the immediate danger of freezing to death or running out of breathable air are completely forgotten. The BFS starts seeing underwater aliens and the Freaking Out Seal (FOS) starts cutting himself and decides to send the nuclear warhead down into the abyss to destroy the aliens. The other Seals follow his orders, largely because they won't recognize the symptoms of freak out and they are, like all Movie Military People, slavishly devoted to the chain of command.
By the time everyone realizes what has happened, it's necessary for the BFS to allow herself to drown so Ed Harris can drag her back to the base and resuscitate her. He waits until she is *completely* dead before starting the arduous process of dragging her back to the ship, despite the fact that time is kind of the essence here, but he really has nothing to worry about because - despite being unresponsive to traditional revival methods - he is able to bring her back to life by shouting at her. Ed then dons some pressure resistant diving equipment and drops down into the abyss to disarm the nuclear warhead, apparently because the one remaining Seal isn't up to the task. Disarming the warhead is as easy as "cutting the red wire" (as usual), but Ed is hampered by a light source that makes everything look equally yellow, so he just takes a 50-50 chance.
Surprisingly, he guesses correctly and doesn't die, but of course he doesn't have enough oxygen to make it back up to the surface, so he lays down to die. We can't have *that*, so aliens rescue Ed, provide him with a pressurized atmosphere complete with oxygen, talk to him for a bit (we don't get to see that) and then - in the biggest Deus Ex Machina ever attempted on the silver screen - drag Ed and the rest of the crew up to the surface where the hurricane has miraculously dissipated and Ed and Co. do not suffer from the rapid changes in pressure because the aliens "did something to us". None of the terrified military personnel open fire on the aliens, and the movie ends with Ed and the BFS realizing that whatever differences that drove them to divorce have been settled by the events of the movie and that they are super in love now and forever.
The most irksome aspects of The Abyss are the way the plot lurches from one point to another, immediately forgetting what has gone before in favor of the newer, shiny plot development. Nothing is ever resolved so much as just abandoned - the submarine rescue efforts are token at best, the equipment the base is attached to ceases to be a problem after it tumbles over a cliff, the low oxygen and electricity are forgotten immediately, and even the alien sub-plot is massively half-baked as we are left wondering why they've taken this long to come up and look around if they can come up so easily and with no side-effects to their health. I mean, if humans could go to the bottom of the ocean without worrying about oxygen and bitter cold and pressure issues, we would have done so years ago, so why haven't these advanced aliens done so? Apparently it just hadn't occurred to them.
Maybe this is a great nostalgia flick if you caught it in the 80's and liked it then. Probably when this came out, it was unique enough that the cool plot and awesome aliens made up for the terrible script and pacing. But if you're new like me, then skip this movie because there are much better out there. I liked Contact well enough, but The Abyss was just too cheesy and silly for me to take seriously.
This piece of solid sci-fi/adventure comes to DVD A solid cast of characters and an interesting premis drive this sci-fi offering. Ed Harris is the tool pusher, the #1 man on an oil rig, except that this rig is located on the ocean floor. When a US Navy submarine sinks in the vicinity Harris and his crew are caught up in the middle of an international drama. Things get take a turn for the grim when a team of Navy SEALS arrive at the undersea rig and take over...you'll have to watch to see what I mean.
Likes: 1) I like the setting for the story - the deep sea 2) I like the assortment of characters that work on the rig, the intelligent and strong-willed woman engineer that designed the rig 3) The contrasting attitudes of the SEAL teams, especially their team leader 4) Some of the special effects are quite good - for example, the "water tentacle" is great 5) The portrayal of challenges of living in the deep-sea
Dislikes: 1) The special effects used to depict the NTIs (watch and you'll see) are getting to be pretty dated, though they were good when the movie was originally released...that's about it. 2) There's way too much meaningless profanity sprinkled throughout the movie...though some would contend that such language would be essential for accurately portraying oil workers...I wonder.
All in all this is an engaging and interesting bit of inner-space sci-fi. If you enjoy sci-fi you will enjoy this, though it's doubtful that if you take a careful look that it will truly score 5 stars.
This is a solid 4-star offering, no doubt about it. You'll be glad you own your own copy.
Angels in the Void Remember when big Hollywood films had complex characters, interesting ideas, and cared enough to invest time in small details? "The Abyss" contains potent drama, genuine thrills, poignant beauty, and ultimately, and ending which forces us to examine ourselves as a species.
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