1989: The Abyss (30th!)

What else happened this year? The Tiananmen Square Massacre, also known as 'the what?' in China. The Berlin Wall fell this year too.

What is the plot - in one sentence? A rough-and-ready crew of undersea salvage workers have to recover a nuclear submarine, but it's made harder with the threat of war above the waves, weather conditions down below, some annoying army guys, and last but not least... ALIENS.

I don't have time, just spoil it for me? the ALIENS (or some deep-sea AI thing, it doesn't matter) threaten to destroy the world through a series of giant tidal waves, but they stop when Ed Harris writes 'I love you wife' to his ex-wife. This is the same Ex-wife that he has been very unpleasant to for the entire movie. After various battles and a race to the finish, the aliens bring them to the surface. The surviving crew are ecstatic, so much so that they must have forgotten all of their recently dead colleagues.

What is the meaning of the title? There's an Abyss where the alien things live.

'Greetings human, please stop shaking that, it's not my hand.' 

Anything that's not aged well? Does a woman get slapped around? The two (!) women characters are pretty sassy, but one of them drowns, and is woken up ( following an extended 'don't you die on me!' scene) where her corpse is slapped around before the miraculous recovery. She was out so long that she would have had brain damage for sure, and to top it all of, everyone in the room was watching and got to see her boobs.

Any thoughts? I haven't seen Titanic. However, I've seen enough parodies of it that I was able to tell the entire story to a group who were impressed by how much it had seeped into my subconscious.

In a similar way, I hadn't seen the Abyss, but I'd basically seen it before. I hated this. Every bad aspect of a James Cameron movie was on full display: a working class group or heroes, despite the fact that to operate that machinery would require academic scientific knowledge? Check. CLoth-eared dialogue? Check and check. I nearly vomited when one of them talked about 'candles in the dark.' The military as 'evil?' - yep, they're bad guys down there, and above, where there's some war going on. There's also the utterly needless dynamic between Ed Harris and his ex-wife, who ends up down there for some reason? Yep. They realise that they really still love each other after it all, so don't worry.

The one thing you can say for in a bad James Cameron movie, the 'spectacle' and action, aren't good here either. The 'action' in Aliens is good enough to offset the dumb chatter by all of the soldiers. This though, it's filmed underwater, and a lot of the 'action' is for building sized machines interacting and crashing. It also must have been hell to actually film, as a lot of the time the actors are waist deep in water, and that's just asking for urinary tract infections. It's a fine technical achievement, but that doesn't make it interesting, no sir.

Like most James Cameron movies, this was far too long. There's a full 45 minutes left after the ex-wife is brought back to life, as the army guy leaves for some reason and has to be stopped. It was utterly pointless and had no heft behind it.

The crew itself was irritating. They talk in a way that doesn't happen in real life. There's a couple of idiot rednecks in there, a 'nerd' who has a rat on his shoulder, and a giant with sea sickness. Most tokenistic is the sassy cowgirl who is an expert driver. There's no surprise that most of them didn't make a career as a star, despite being in such a huge movie.

 Would you recommend this? I hated this. To make matters worse, it turns out that I watched the extended version. Don't waste your time.

Final thoughts? Let's ignore the fact that the alien manipulating water to become a water sausage with a face on it, was obviously the inspiration for that water temple boss in Ocarina of time, and focus more on the aliens' plan to destroy the planet.

So, the aliens / AI (who are in the movie for about 10 seconds, total) threaten the world with giant tidal waves, they're shown growing ever larger in front of terrified crowds. However, the aliens plan is reversed after they watch a little TV and see the 'love' in the interactions between Ed Harris and his ex-wife. So... did they only do the waves thing as a threat, to get people to be nicer to each other, or were they really dissuaded from an attack by such a small thing? Either way, it doesn't reflect well on them. 

 

More of these, some of which I liked, can be found here.