The Abyss

This article refers to the film. For other uses, see Abyss.

The Abyss is an award-winning science fiction film from 1989, written and directed by James Cameron, starring Ed Harris, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and Michael Biehn. There is a theatrical release version (140 minutes) and a Director's Cut version (171 minutes).

Underwater scenes were filmed in the containment building of an unfinished nuclear power plant in Gaffney, South Carolina, in the United States. It took 26.5 million litres (seven million gallons) of water to fill the tank to a depth of 13 metres (40 feet), making it the largest underwater set ever. The depth and length of time spent underwater meant that the cast and crew had to go through decompression.

There is a novelization written by Orson Scott Card.

Plot

In the beginning of the film, the USS Montana, a fictional American Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine sinks near the edge of the Cayman Trough after an accidental encounter with an unknown 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 on to an experimental underwater oil platform named "Deep Core", which, by pure chance, is situated near the wreck site, and to mount operations from there. Benthic Petroleum, the owner of the platform, volunteers both the platform and its crew of oil workers to the Navy to assist in what they believe to be a rescue operation.

If bad weather and international tensions escalating toward war are not enough, the SEAL team is accompanied down to the rig by the platform's designer, Lindsey Brigman (Mastrantonio). Her estranged husband, Virgil "Bud" Brigman (Harris), is the foreman of the platform. (Also, unknown to anyone on the rig, 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 of the sub, finding no survivors, the oil workers encounter an alien, but are uncertain what to make of it; all they know for sure is that "something" is down there and it is capable of unprecedented speed and maneuverability. Believing the alien to be a previously-uncatalogued Soviet submersible, the SEAL team recovers one of the nuclear warheads from the submarine. Acting upon a pre-arranged contingency plan, the SEALs prepare to use it to destroy the sub, its remaining weapons, and its codebooks to prevent them from falling into enemy hands. This is done without the knowledge of Deep Core's crew or Benthic Petroleum.

The strengthening hurricane causes a catastrophic accident that leaves Deep Core severely damaged, and with several crewmembers (oil workers and Navy SEALs) dead or injured. With its umbilical to the surface severed, Deep Core is cut off from surface oxygen, power, and communications, and must struggle by on its insufficient onboard reserves until the weather clears and the Navy and oil company can rescue them from the platform.

At this point, the aliens decide to explore the rig and in doing so, contact the stranded workers, definitively proving themselves to be an advanced sentient alien race. They clearly mean no harm, but the now totally paranoid Coffey does not see it this way, and prepares to send the warhead to the bottom of the trench, set on a timer to explode. After a brief battle between Lindsey and Bud (in one submersible) and Coffey (in another), Coffey is killed; but the bomb had been released, strapped to a remote vehicle programmed to maneuver to the mysterious bottom of the trench where the aliens seem to live.

This leaves Bud and Lindsey stranded several hundred meters away from the platform in their slowly flooding submersible. With time running out, and their sole working breathing system hardwired into Bud's diving helmet, Lindsey conceives a desperate plan: he puts the helmet on, watches her drown, and then drags her back to Deep Core's medical facilities in the hopes that the hibernation effects of extreme hypothermia will let her survive long enough to reach air and let her be revived. At first he tries to get Lindsey to put on his diving suit, but Bud ultimately sees no option, as if they were to switch suits, she would not be able to drag his body back in time to save him. He drags her unprotected body across the sea floor back to Deep Core, where Bud eventually succeeds in shocking Lindsey's heart back into beating (the rest of the crew having given up), though she is much the worse for wear.

Bud realizes that they are the only ones able to stop a nuclear attack on a sentient race, and puts on a secret diving suit that the SEALs had brought aboard. It is designed to protect a diver to extreme depths, and incorporates a liquid breathing system that will let Bud dive to the bottom of the three-mile-deep trench and disarm the warhead, under instructions via modulated ultrasound by the sole surviving (and trustworthy) SEAL, whose broken leg forces him to remain on the platform. Bud must communicate by typing on a keypad, as he cannot talk with his mouth and throat and larynx full of the breathing liquid.

Bud succeeds, but his team is shocked to learn that he does not have enough oxygen remaining in the breathing liquid to return to Deep Core. Bud types back to Lindsey and the rest of the crew that he knew going in that it would be a one-way trip, but that he could not let the warhead detonate and destroy the aliens. He sends a final, heatbreaking message to Lindsey: "LOVE YOU WIFE".

At the bottom of the trench, the aliens find Bud clinging to life and bring him into a specially-created chamber of normally-pressurized air within their underwater city. There, the aliens show him the messages that he sent, and return him and the Deep Core platform to the surface, unharmed, by carrying the platform on top of their underwater craft.

In the director's cut, the aliens, alarmed by man's warlike tendencies (displayed to Bud as a montage of intercepted news footage showing man's barbarism spanning nearly a century), and fearing that our violence would one day spread to their own habitat, prepare to destroy all coastal regions of the world by generating giant megatsunamis and freak waves. The aliens relent when they examine Bud's final communication to his wife, realizing that mankind still has the potential for good. Some have noticed a similarity between this ending and the ending of The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Critical Reception

The Abyss was initially greeted with a lukewarm critical response, due its multiple plots—an intense character drama, a love story, a tale of military paranoia, a supernatural alien mystery in the tradition of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Its stunning use of computer-generated special effects, however, was praised almost universally, and since the release of the director's cut, the film has garnered a strong cult following as a modern science-fiction classic.

Awards

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.

Trivia

Because it was not possible to use digital effects extensively at the time, Cameron convinced the studio that underwater filming was necessary for realism. The production team had trouble finding a tank big enough. Finally, they found a half-completed abandoned nuclear power station near Gaffney, South Carolina. The exterior of the rig and the cliff were both built in two half-completed reactor cooling tanks.
The film was censored by the American Humane Association for a scene in which a rat is held "underwater": actually, in an oxygenated fluorocarbon liquid used in fluid breathing systems. Five rats were used in the film. The rats were unharmed and one became Cameron's pet, but died of natural causes before the film opened. In the UK this scene was still replaced with a scene where what happens to the rat is verbally described by the characters, because the Royal Veterinarian thought the experience was painful for the rat.
- Some believe that, at the time of the film's theatrical release in the UK, the rat-breathing scene was shown fully intact, and that it was only some years later, when the film came to be shown on UK television networks, that the scene was indeed edited heavily. However, there is other anecdotal evidence that when The Abyss opened in the UK in 1989, this scene had already clearly been cut. Regardless, the scene is now included in UK broadcasts.
This is the third film directed by James Cameron where Michael Biehn plays a military figure, the others being The Terminator and Aliens.
The diving equipment had to be specially designed to allow the actors to remain underwater for hours at a time, and to allow their entire face to be seen by the camera while underwater.
The shooting was very painful for both the cast and the crew; so that several started giving the movie names like "The Son of Abyss" and "Life's Abyss And Then You Dive", and there is even a poster saying "The Abuse", mocking the actual poster with extended U.
Due to injuries he sustained on set, Ed Harris was almost unable to accept the role of Frankie Flannery in his next film, State of Grace.
Ed Harris and James Cameron reputedly clashed vigorously during filming.
Ed Harris really pounded Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio during the scene where his team tries to revive her, and James Cameron was asking for repeats, not satisfied. Lying exposed and being pounded, Mastrantonio stormed out of the set because she could not take it any more after the cameraman announced that they had been re-filming the scene for so long that more film had to be loaded into the camera.
It was not liquid breathing fluid pumped into Ed Harris' suit, but pink water, and he was holding his breath. For the underwater scenes, a similar suit was made with a pink shader that could be opened easily from outside so that the crew could provide him with oxygen between takes. He also had to wear specially-made contact lenses to focus under the water. Because the tank was not deep enough, he was pulled horizontally for each take of the descent sequence. Harris nearly drowned in one take before divers could reach him.

Box office

Opening weekend U.S. gross: $9,319,797
Total U.S. box office gross: $54,243,125

External links