The Abyss

Infobox Film
name = The Abyss


caption =
director = James Cameron
producer = Gale Anne Hurd,
Van Ling (special edition)
writer = James Cameron
starring = Ed Harris,
Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio,
Michael Biehn
J.C. Quinn
Kimberly Scott
music = Alan Silvestri
cinematography = Mikael Salomon
editing = Conrad Buff
Joel Goodman
distributor = 20th Century Fox
Lightstorm Entertainment
released = August 9 1989
runtime = 146 min / (171 min) (special edition)
country = United States
location =
language = English
budget = $40,000,000
gross = $131,200,000
preceded_by =
followed_by =
website =
amg_id = 1:659
imdb_id = 0096754

"The Abyss" is a science fiction film that was written and directed by James Cameron in 1989. It stars Ed Harris, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and Michael Biehn. The original musical score was composed by Alan Silvestri. It was released on August 9, 1989 in the United States.

Underwater scenes were filmed in the containment building of Cherokee Nuclear Power Plant (coord|35.037|N|81.512|W|), an unfinished nuclear power plant near Gaffney, South Carolina, in the United States. It took seven million gallons (26.5 million liters) of water to fill the tank to a depth of convert|40|ft|m, making it the largest underwater set ever. The depth and length of time spent underwater meant that the cast and crew sometimes had to go through decompression. Filming was also done at the largest underground lake in the world—a mine in Bonne Terre, Missouri, which was the background for several underwater shots. B movie maker Earl Owensby of Shelby, NC, provided facilities for set and production.

The official novelization of the same title was written by Orson Scott Card. As it was written concurrently with filming, Card's insight into the characters was often added to the script and to the actors' portrayals.

Plot

An American ballistic missile submarine sinks near the edge of the Cayman Trough after an accidental encounter with a mysterious object. As Soviet submarines head to the area, and with a hurricane moving in, the quickest way to mount a rescue is for a SEAL team to be inserted onto an experimental underwater oil platform, which they will then use as their base of operations.

In a subplot the SEAL team is accompanied by the platform's designer, Dr. Lindsey Brigman (Mastrantonio). Her estranged husband, Virgil "Bud" Brigman (Harris) is the foreman of the platform. Unbeknownst to anyone, the SEAL leader Lt. Coffey (Biehn) has developed High Pressure Nervous Syndrome, and is losing his ability to reason as he passes slowly into a paranoid state.

As the oil workers and SEAL team investigate the wreck, the workers have strange encounters with a creature they can't identify, the same being that inadvertently caused the submarine to crash. The SEAL team meanwhile recovers one of the nuclear warheads from the submarine; their mission, which they keep hidden from the oil workers, is to destroy the sub if salvage is impossible. Meanwhile, the estranged Brigmans argue a great deal. Yet underneath, they clearly have affection and respect for one another.

Tensions continue to mount as, due to the storm, the platform loses contact with the surface, and then is nearly destroyed when its umbilical tether and the associated crane lands on it and drags it close to the edge of the trench. After the crew experiences more strange encounters from what appear to be alien beings, the paranoid Coffey determines that the aliens are a threat. Strapping the warhead to the platform's Remote Operated Vehicle, he decides to send both of them down to the bottom of the trench where the aliens appear to be coming from. The Brigmans intervene and manage to kill Coffey, but are unable to stop the ROV from taking the warhead down into the trench. Trapped in a rapidly flooding submersible, Lindsey orders Bud to use the ship's sole diving suit to swim back to the platform, towing her body. While she will drown, she banks on the very cold water via the mammalian diving reflex, preserving her until she can be resuscitated in the platform. Bud complies and manages to save her life. It seems that the estranged couple is back together.

Bud then dons an experimental diving suit given to him by the remaining SEALs in which the diver breathes in a special fluid instead of air. This has the advantage of allowing the diver to descend to incredible depths without injury, as the body will not be crushed by the pressure. Bud's mission is to dive to the bottom of the trench, deeper than anyone has ever gone before, and disarm the warhead before it detonates. He succeeds in his mission, but Lindsey is distressed to learn that he does not have enough breathing fluid remaining to allow his return to the platform. He tells her, via a wristpad that he always knew it was a one-way trip, but that he had to go to save both the platform crew and the aliens. He transmits a final message saying that he loves her and still considers her to be his wife, and she tells him how much she loves him.

The aliens find Bud as his oxygen runs out and bring him onto their ship. They provide him with air to breathe at his normal pressure, and then return him and the platform to the surface, unharmed and with no need to decompress.

In the director's cut, the aliens are upset at man's warlike tendencies, showing Bud news footage that displays man's violence, particularly evident as U.S.-Soviet tensions have reached a crisis level as a result of the sunken nuclear submarine. The aliens create enormous megatsunami-level standing waves along all of the world's coastlines. Then, having shown the world of what they are capable, and sending a message that humans are headed for destruction, they relent, and show Bud his last communication to his wife, in which Bud explained that he had sacrificed his own life to save the aliens. The aliens and their underwater city surface in the middle of the naval armada, with the platform and the divers.

Production

cquote| I was dive-certified at the age of seventeen and since then have always wanted to do something that incorporated filming and diving—I wanted to do the definitive diving movie. But what do you do? Show the beauties of the coral reef or the perils of killer sharks? Those films have already been done. What I wanted was to go into the realm that had always excited me the most because of its extremes and its absoluteness—I wanted to go deep into the ocean.In high school, I participated in a weekly science seminar where different speakers were brought in to talk about everything from childbirth to the latest advances in physics. One of those speakers happened to be a commercial diver who had participated in an experiment in which he had breathed with a liquid in both lungs for something like forty-five minutes. That really blew my mind. Here was a guy who had used his lungs as a gill mechanism. From that seminar came the idea for a story I wrote about some scientists in a research installation on a cliff overlooking the Cayman Trough. Using liquid breathing suits, they began making forays into the deepest depths of the ocean—but no one who goes down the cliff comes back again. ["The Writer/Director and Screenplay", "The Abyss: Special Edition" DVD]

Critical reception

"The Abyss" was initially greeted with mixed response. While praising the film's first two hours as "compelling," The Toronto Star remarked, "But when Cameron takes the adventure to the next step, deep into heart of fantasy, it all becomes one great big deja boo. If we are to believe what Cameron finds way down there, E.T. didn't really call home, he went surfing and fell off his board." [The Toronto Star, October 9, 1989] Conversely, Rolling Stone enthused, " [The Abyss is] the greatest underwater adventure ever filmed, the most consistently enthralling of the summer blockbusters, one of the best pictures of the year." [http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/movie/5947965/review/5947966/the_abyss]

The release of the Special Edition in 1993 garnered much praise. Each giving it thumbs up, Siskel remarked, "The Abyss has been improved," and Ebert added, "it makes the film seem more well rounded." [See linked review below...] The book "Reel Views 2" comments, "James Cameron's The Abyss may be the most extreme example of an available movie that demonstrates how the vision of a director, once fully realized on screen, can transform a good motion picture into a great one." [Reel Views 2: The Ultimate Guide to the Best 1,000 Modern Movies on DVD and Video By James Berardinelli, page 582]

The movie review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives "The Abyss" a "Certified Fresh" rating of 82%. [http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/abyss/] However, it should be noted that the reviews cited are a mix of ones covering either the theatrical release or the Special Edition, and one negative review appears to have been counted twice.

Awards and nominations

"The Abyss" won the 1990 Oscar for Best Visual Effects. It was also nominated for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Cinematography and Best Sound. The studio lobbied hard to get Michael Biehn nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, but to no avail.

"The Abyss" was nominated for many other awards, such as by Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films and the American Society of Cinematographers. It ended up winning a total of three other awards from these organizations.

History of the Special Edition

Even as the film was in the first weeks of its 1989 theatrical release, rumors were circulating of a wave sequence missing from the end of the movie. As chronicled in the 1993 laser disc Special Edition release and later in the 2000 DVD, the pressure to cut the film's running time primarily stemmed from two sources: distribution concerns and Industrial Light & Magic's then inability to complete the required sequences. From the distributor's perspective the looming three hour length limited the number of times the film could be shown each day, assuming that audiences would be willing to sit through it all (1990's "Dances with Wolves" would shatter both industry-held notions). Further, test audience screenings revealed a surprisingly mixed reaction to the sequences as they appeared in their unfinished form, with it being most mentioned both in the "Scenes I liked most" and "Scenes I liked least" fields. Contrary to speculation, studio meddling was not the cause of the shortened length; Cameron held final cut as long as the film met a certain running time; roughly two hours and fifteen minutes. He later noted, "Ironically, the studio brass were horrified when I said I was cutting the wave. ["The Abyss Special Edition DVD, The Restoration"] "

cquote| What emerges in the winnowing process is only the best stuff. And I think the overall caliber of the film is improved by that. I cut only two minutes of "Terminator". On "Aliens", we took out much more. I even reconstituted some of that in a special (TV) release version.The sense of something being missing on "Aliens" was greater for me than on "The Abyss", where the film just got consistently better as the cut got along. The film must function as a dramatic, organic whole. When I cut the film together, things that read well on paper, on a conceptual level, didn't necessarily translate to the screen as well. I felt I was losing something by breaking my focus. Breaking the story's focus and coming off the main characters was a far greater detriment to the film than what was gained. The film keeps the same message intact at a thematic level, not at a really overt level, by working in a symbolic way.

Cameron elected to remove the sequences along with other shorter scenes elsewhere in the film, reducing the running time from roughly two hours and fifty minutes down to two hours and twenty minutes and diminishing his signature themes of nuclear peril and disarmament. Subsequent test audience screenings drew substantially better reactions.

Star Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio publicly expressed regret about some of the scenes selected for removal from the film's theatrical cut.

Shortly after the film's theatrical premiere, Cameron and video editor Ed Marsh created a longer video cut of "The Abyss" for their own use using dailies; it was not released. With the tremendous success of Cameron's "" in 1992, Lightstorm Entertainment secured a five year, USD$500 million financing deal with 20th Century Fox for films produced, directed or written by Cameron. [ [http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/contributor/1800012402/bio James Cameron biography] from Yahoo! Movies] Within this contract, roughly $500,000 was allocated to complete "The Abyss." ["The Toronto Star, Starweek Magazine"] ILM was commissioned to finish the work they had started three years earlier, with many of the same people who had worked on it originally. The computer-generated imagery tools developed for "Terminator 2" allowed ILM to complete one new shot and correct flaws in their original work. New dialogue, sound effects and foley were recorded when it was discovered that original production sound recordings had been lost. Alan Silvestri was not available to compose new music for the restored scenes. Robert Garrett, who had composed temp music for the film's initial cutting in 1989, was chosen to create new music. The project was completed in December 1992, saw a limited theatrical release in New York City and Los Angeles starting on February 26, 1993 and ventured to points beyond on the revival circuit. The laserdisc release was the first officially THX-certified laser disc and was a best-seller for months.

Budget and box office

*Estimated budget: $40,000,000

*Opening weekend U.S. gross: $9,319,797
*Total U.S. box office gross: $85,200,000
*Foreign Box Office: $46,000,000 [Paula Parisi, "Titanic and the Making of James Cameron," 1998, pg. 19]

References

External links

*imdb title|id=0096754|title=The Abyss
*amg movie|id=1:659|title=The Abyss
*rotten-tomatoes|id=abyss|title=The Abyss
*mojo title|id=abyss|title=The Abyss
* [http://www.moviewavs.com/Movies/Abyss.shtml Abyss quotes] at MovieWavs.com
* [http://www.x-plane.com/adventures/abyss.html Abyss set visit] at Gaffney by two fans
* [http://www.snydersweb.com/destinations/abyssTrip.html Abyss set pictures] at Gaffney with both air and ground shots
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciRmle_TLsI 1993 Entertainment Tonight report on the release of the Special Edition on laserdisc.]
* [http://bventertainment.go.com/tv/buenavista/ebertandroeper/index2.html?sec=6&subsec=the+abyss Siskel & Ebert review] of the Special Edition release on Laserdisc.
* [http://www.dareland.com/emulsionalproblems/abyss.htm Movieline interview with James Cameron on the making of "The Abyss"]