The Abyss

You ever have a friend that has a hobby they're super into and they won't shut up about it, to the point where any trace of interest you might have is extinguished by their relentlessness on the topic? James Cameron and the ocean. Yeah, it's neat and mysterious, but the dude's zeal for it is all-consuming, and it's just a bit much. So much, he built an entire movie around it. Only problem is, when he realized "people go diving" isn't a movie, he threw all sorts of things in there. Marines, survival, the biggest damned nuclear weapon ever, weather, and an underwater extraterrestrial colony. It's like a kid playing with all of their toys all at once, never mind the fact that the proportions don't match. I'm not saying it isn't an enjoyable movie. There is plenty to like about The Abyss. The cinematography must be commended, of course. James Cameron did all he could to make the underwater and effects shots look as state of the art as possible, and to capture the mystery and majesty of the deep ocean. In that regard, he succeeded tremendously. When it goes into the ocean, this is a gorgeous movie to watch. The acting is also commendable. Ed Harris, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and Michael Biehn are the three leads, and they're all great. The support cast does their job, nothing amazing, but there's no sore thumbs here. The Abyss' problem is a movie that is over-stuffed with under-baked ideas that never come together, and never justify building a whole movie around. It starts off with an American nuclear sub going missing, and the Navy contracting a civilian team on an experimental underwater oil drilling platform to find it, with the help of some SEALs. The SEALs have a secret mission, but they say it's a rescue. Except the sub is fully submerged, so what's to rescue? Why, the nuclear weapons, of course, because this is the Cold War era! We're gonna nuke Russia for maybe destroying the sub despite no evidence whatsoever of it being Russia! And then people see a weird phantom neon alien stingray thingy. And then there's a hurricane that damages the platform and strands the deep-sea portion. And then the leader of the SEALS goes nuts and wants to detonate the nuclear warhead, but it gets lost in a trench. And then the life support systems are failing. And then, and then, and then, and then ... None of this stuff is fully developed. The ticking clock aspect of the life support systems failing is abandoned for a long stretch while they deal with the nuclear weapon. And the aliens come and go at will. And there's romantic tension between Mastrantonio and Harris. And then they get stuck in a submersible together. The movie just keeps piling things on top of itself. It never loses momentum, but it does keep changing lanes without any consideration for whether or not it had run out the previous one. And in that need to play with all the toys, Cameron misses some plot details and logic gaps that cannot be ignored. It leaves the whole movie feeling like it was put together in a rush, stuffed with a bunch of concepts in the hopes of covering that none of them could fill the space on their own, but ignoring that the jigsaw pieces didn't quite fit together. I do like The Abyss, in spite of itself. There are some interesting ideas, even if they're half-formed. I love the look of the movie, and it is a solid cast. I just wish that, in Cameron's rush to share his love of deep sea diving and the bottom of the ocean, he stopped to give us a reason WHY he loved it so much, instead of giving us a hundred other things just distract from each other.