The Abyss

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The Abyss
Directed by James Cameron
Produced by Gale Anne Hurd,
Van Ling (special edition)
Written by James Cameron
Starring Ed Harris,
Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio,
Michael Biehn
J.C. Quinn
Kimberly Scott
Music by Alan Silvestri
Cinematography Mikael Salomon
Editing by Joel Goodman
Distributed by 20th Century Fox
Lightstorm Entertainment
Release date(s) August 9, 1989
Running time 146 min / (171 min) (special edition)
Country United States
Language English
Budget $40,000,000
Gross revenue $131,200,000
Allmovie profile
IMDb profile

The Abyss is a 1989 science fiction film that was written and directed by James Cameron. 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 (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 40 feet (12 m), making it the largest underwater set ever. The depth and length of time spent underwater meant that the cast and crew had to sometimes 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 Abyss 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.

The soundtrack was released by Varese Sarabande (VSD-5235.)

Contents

[edit] 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 sinks slowly into a paranoid state.

As the oil workers and SEAL team investigate the wreck, the oil workers have a strange encounter with a creature they can't identify, and are uncertain what to make of it. The SEAL team recovers one of the nuclear warheads from the submarine; their mission (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 great affection 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 surface apparatus lands on it and drags it close to the edge of the trench. After the crew experiences two strange encounters from what appear to be alien beings, the paranoid Coffey determines that the aliens are a threat, and decides to send the nuclear warhead down to the bottom of the trench where the aliens appear to be coming from. In a confrontation between two submersibles (Coffey vs. the Brigmans), Lindsey and Bud Brigman manage to kill Coffey, but cannot stop the nuclear time bomb from falling into the trench. The Brigmans end up trapped in their damaged submersible, which is rapidly taking on freezing water. They are several minutes' swim from the platform, and only Bud has a drysuit. 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 frozen water, via the mammalian diving reflex, preserving her until she can be resuscitated at the platform. Bud manages to save her life, and it seems that the estranged couple is back together.

Bud then dons an experimental diving suit brought by the SEALs in which the diver breathes in a special fluid instead of air. This has the advantage of one needing a much smaller volume of material to inhale, and requires no decompression if Bud returns to the depth of the platform. Bud's mission is to dive to the bottom of the trench—deeper than anyone has ever gone—and disarm the warhead before it harms the alien creatures. He succeeds in his mission, but Lindsey is distressed to learn that he doesn't have enough breathable liquid to allow his return. He tells her, via a wristpad, that he always knew it was a one-way trip, but he had to come (to save the aliens). He transmits a final message saying that he loves her, while she tells him how much she loves him.

The aliens find Bud and bring him onto their ship. They provide him with air to breathe, and 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 (displayed to Bud as news footage showing man's barbarism, and particularly evident as U.S.-Soviet tensions have reached a crisis level as a result of the missing nuclear submarine). The aliens create enormous, megatsunami-level standing waves along all of the world's coastlines. Then, having shown the world what they are capable of, and sent 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. This ending is very similar in style to the ending of The Day the Earth Stood Still.

[edit] Critical reception

The Abyss was initially greeted with a lukewarm critical response. Its use of computer-generated special effects, however, was praised almost universally, paving the way for Cameron's future projects such as Terminator 2. Since the release of The Abyss's director's cut, the film has garnered a strong cult following.

[edit] Conception

“ 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. [1]

 ”
“ What I originally wrote was a very, very crude and simple story dealing with the idea of being in the very deep ocean and doing fluid breathing and making a descent to the bottom from a staging submersible laboratory that was on the edge. Being on the brink of the bottomless pit, and the title, and the psychological ramifications of returning to the womb, breathing a liquid and falling to your death while simultaneously going back to your birth, much of that symbology is inherent in that first story. That was taken and layered upon and expanded. [2] ”

[edit] 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.[3]"

“ 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. [2]

 ”

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.

“ There were some beautiful scenes that were taken out. I just wish we hadn't shot so much that isn't in the film. [2] ”

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 Terminator 2: Judgment Day 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.[4] Within this contract, roughly $500,000 was allocated to complete The Abyss.[5] 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. Critical response to the Special Edition version of the film has been generally favorable.[6]

[edit] Reception

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.

[edit] References in popular culture

  • In the 1996 film Twister, a large petroleum tanker is destroyed by a tornado. The words "BENTHIC PETROLEUM" can be clearly seen as the truck flies past the camera.

[edit] 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[7]

[edit] References

  1. ^ "The Writer/Director and Screenplay", The Abyss: Special Edition DVD
  2. ^ a b c Starlog, Issue 150, interview by Ian Spelling
  3. ^ The Abyss Special Edition DVD, The Restoration
  4. ^ James Cameron biography from Yahoo! Movies
  5. ^ The Toronto Star, Starweek Magazine
  6. ^ The Abyss from MetaCritic
  7. ^ Paula Parisi, Titanic and the Making of James Cameron, 1998, pg. 19

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
v • d • e
Films and television series by James Cameron
1970s-1980s
Xenogenesis (1978) • Piranha II: The Spawning (1981) • The Terminator (1984) • Aliens (1986) • The Abyss (1989)
1990s
2000s
Dark Angel (2000-2002) • Expedition: Bismarck (2002) • Ghosts of the Abyss (2003) • Aliens of the Deep (2005) • Avatar (2009) • Battle Angel (TBA) • The Dive (TBA)