Blub blub it’s Burl! yes, I’m underwater
again, and it’s 1989, so I must be reviewing Leviathan! No? Oh, ha ha, then is it Deep Star Six? No? The Rift? Endless Descent?
Full Fathom Five? Okay, last guess: The Abyss!
Of course it is the James Cameron picture,
famous for its difficult shooting conditions and the subaqueous martinet at its
helm, that we’re discussing today! It was partly shot in an abandoned cooling
tower owned by Earl Owensby, where a big model undersea base was built, and the
actors and crew had to swim around like crappies! Ha ha, it’s funny to think of
even the least little touch of Owensby on this big giant Fox production!
Anyway, the tale tells of a gang of
roughbusters who man an underwater oil drilling unit; and never mind the
environmental sketchiness of this idea, but the blue-collar posse somehow ingratiates
where the analogous roughbusters in Armageddon
make you hope their oil rig will be hit by advance meteor shards as soon as
possible! The guy in charge is Ed “Creepshow”
Harris, playing Bud, and he’s just a regular fella, regular as a bowl of prunes!
His ex-wife, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, the lady from Scarface and Slamdance,
and who happens to have designed the underwater oil drilling base, descends to
the rig with a bunch of marines led by a mustachioed Michael Biehn, well-known
from Navy Seals and other Cameron
pictures, like Aliens! The idea is
that they’re all going to cooperate to find the missing submarine!
Biehn, already kind of a jerk, is
busy getting worse from some kind of pressure madness! The appearance of
underwater aliens hastens this process, and soon (well, not soon: this is a
three-hour movie!), he’s sending a recovered nuclear torpedo on a collision
course with the alien ship! Along the way there’s plenty of yelling, bubbles, a
punchfight or two, miraculous alien water tendrils, a lot of salt-of-the-earth
grassroots-folk stuff, and the surprising revelation that salt-of-the-earth
grassroots folk, in addition to being good with tools and fond of jargon, are committed pacifists! Ha ha, that’s a message I can get
behind!
The aliens themselves look like angelic
parameciums and are not completely ungoofy, especially in a shot of one of them
taking Ed Harris by the hand and guiding him Peter Pan style toward their big
ship, but this almost doesn’t ruin the movie! Ha ha! Most of the picture holds
together well, plays with reasonable seriousness, and serves as a solid underwater adventure! All the acting
is good - Harris channels Ralph Kramden, Mastrantonio creates a unique "likeable bitch" character, and honestly, I think this is Biehn’s finest hour - and the verisimilitude
Cameron was going for is there in spades! Whether Ed Harris, who vowed never to
talk about the experience of making this picture, now considers that it was
worth the trouble is unknown to me! Probably not! He probably thinks more
fondly on something like The Right Stuff, where he was way up high instead of way down low, or Apollo 13, in which he got to wear a snazzy white vest!
I tend to credit the underwater pictures
more than they deserve, and maybe that’s true of The Abyss also! But the fact remains that I both enjoy it and am
impressed by its determined physicality! For the first two thirds anyway, ha
ha! And the death of Biehn, smashed like an egg, is particularly memorable! I
give The Abyss two and a half elbows
to the tape player!
It's an impressive technical feat, but it's also a turnaround for a director who would never have entertained negotiating with The Terminator or the Alien Queen. To make up for it, he refused to negotiate with his cast and crew! So you can understand why the hippy-dippy stuff left many sceptical.
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