The Abyss

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	Conrad Buff Joel Goodman
Distributed by	20th Century Fox
Release date(s)	August 9, 1989
Running time	146 minutes 171 minutes (special edition)
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$70,000,000[1]
Gross revenue	$90,000,098[2]

The Abyss is a 1989 science fiction film 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 North America.

Underwater scenes were filmed in the containment building of Cherokee Nuclear Power Plant (35°02′13″N 81°30′43″W / 35.037°N 81.512°W / 35.037; -81.512), 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 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.^{[citation needed]}

Plot

An American ballistic missile submarine, the USS Montana, sinks near the edge of the Cayman Trough after an accidental encounter with an unidentified submerged object. As Soviet ships and submarines head towards the area in an attempt to salvage the sub, and with a hurricane moving in, the Americans decide that the quickest way to mount a rescue is for a SEAL team to be inserted onto a privately owned 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 (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio). Her estranged husband, Virgil "Bud" Brigman (Ed Harris) is the foreman of the platform. Unbeknownst to anyone, the Navy SEAL leader Lt. Hiram Coffey (Michael 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. Meanwhile, the estranged Brigmans argue a great deal; yet underneath, they clearly have affection and respect for one another.

As the storm intensifies, Coffey and his team take one of the rig's mini-subs without authorization on a classified mission to the Montana to retrieve one of the warheads from the ship's Trident missiles. Unbeknownst to the SEAL team, the mini-sub that they took was the only vehicle capable of disconnecting the station's umbilical cord to its parent surface ship, the Benthic Explorer. Upon their return, the SEALs remove the warhead and turn the sub over to its normal pilot, "One Night", who takes it out in an attempt to disconnect the umbilicus.

By this time, the Explorer is in the middle of the hurricane, and being tossed violently by powerful winds and waves generated by the storm. The ship's motion makes it impossible for One Night to disconnect the cable, which is jerking about with such power that it begins to drag the station along the bottom towards the trench. The stress of the cable causes the derrick crane that supports the station to break away from the ship, momentarily stopping the station's slide towards the trench. The crew is relieved that they have avoided death, but the joy is short-lived as they realize the crane, which is still attached to the rig via the umbilicus, is descending to them at an increasing rate. As it floats past the rig into the chasm, the crew realizes that the crane's momentum will pull the rig into the chasm, and they brace for the impact. The impact violently jerks the station towards the chasm causing massive damage and flooding, killing six of the station's crew and injuring several of the surviving crew and SEALs.

Tensions mount as the platform has lost contact with the surface and anger of the crew towards the SEALs intensifies over the deaths of their friends and co-workers. The crew begins to experience more strange encounters from what appear to be underwater beings (referred to as non-terrestrial intelligences, or NTIs), which the paranoid Coffey determines to be a threat. Strapping the warhead to Big Geek, one of the platform's remote operated vehicles, he decides to send both of them down to the bottom of the trench where the NTIs appear to be coming from. Bud and Lindsey intervene and manage to stop Coffey, who falls off a ledge and is crushed within his submersible by the pressure, 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 preserving her via the mammalian diving reflex until she can be resuscitated in the platform. Bud complies and manages to save her life, using a defibrillator.

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 by having liquid in the lungs rather than gas. 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 wrist pad, that he always knew it was a one-way trip, but that he had to go to save both the platform crew and the NTIs. 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 before assuming he's dead.

The NTIs 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 engage in silent communication with him. They then proceed to show him several Television clips they have stored of humanity's destructive behavior, silently explaining that they have left humans alone but now believe humans are too self-destructive to continue this behavior. The NTI's view Bud's transmission "Love you Wife" and decide to stop the storm and tsunamis, realizing human compassion. With everyone baffled, Bud types another message into his communicator and tells them what he has discovered. The NTIs proceed to surface their underwater ship, but it is so massive it lifts most of the naval fleet patrolling the area above the water, including the explorer. Everyone seems fine, including the underwater crew without any need to decompress as the NTI's altered their bodies to allow this. Lindsey sees Bud emerge from the NTI ship and they rush to each other. Greeting each other as a newlywed couple would, they engage in a passionate kiss.

Director's cut

In the director's cut, the NTIs are upset at humankind's warlike tendencies, showing Bud news footage that displays humankind's violence, particularly evident as U.S.-Soviet tensions have reached a crisis level as a result of the sunken nuclear submarine. The NTIs create enormous megatsunami-level standing waves along all of the world's coastlines. Then, having shown the world what they are capable of, 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 he had to sacrifice his life to save the others. The NTIs and their underwater city surface in the middle of the naval armada, with the platform and the divers.

Cast

• Ed Harris as Virgil 'Bud' Brigman
• Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as Lindsey Brigman
• Michael Biehn as U.S. Navy SEAL Lieutenant Hiram Coffey
• Leo Burmester as Catfish De Vries
• Todd Graff as Alan 'Hippy' Carnes
• John Bedford Lloyd as Jammer Willis
• J.C. Quinn as Arliss 'Sonny' Dawson
• Kimberly Scott as Lisa 'One Night' Standing
• Captain Kidd Brewer Jr. as Lew Finler (as Capt. Kidd Brewer Jr.)
• George Robert Klek as Wilhite
• Christopher Murphy as Schoenick, U.S. Navy SEAL Team Member
• Adam Nelson as Ensign Monk, U.S. Navy SEAL Team Member
• Dick Warlock as Dwight Perry (as Richard Warlock)
• Jimmie Ray Weeks as Leland McBride
• J. Kenneth Campbell as DeMarco

Production

The idea for the The Abyss came to James Cameron when, at age 17, he attended a science lecture about deep sea diving in high school by a man who claimed to have been the first human to breath fluid through his lungs.^[3][4] He subsequently wrote a short story^[5] that focused on a group of scientists in a laboratory at the bottom of the ocean. The basic idea did not change but many of the details evolved over the years. Once Cameron arrived in Hollywood, he quickly realized that a group of scientists was not that commercial and changed it to a group of blue collar workers.^[6] While making Aliens, Cameron saw a National Geographic film about remote operated vehicles operating deep in the North Atlantic Ocean. These images reminded him of his short story.^[4] He and producer Gale Anne Hurd decided that The Abyss would be their next film.^[5] He wrote a treatment combined with elements of a shooting script and this generated a lot of interest in Hollywood. He then wrote the script, basing the character of Lindsey on Hurd and finished it by the end of 1987.^[5] Cameron and Hurd were married before The Abyss, separated during pre-production, and divorced in February 1989, two months after principal photography.^[7]

Pre-production

The cast and crew trained for underwater diving for one week in the Cayman Islands.^[8] This was necessary because 40% of all live-action principal photography took place underwater. Furthermore, Cameron's production company had to design and build experimental equipment and develop a state-of-the-art communications system that allowed the director to talk underwater to the actors and dialogue to be recorded directly onto tape for the first time.^[9]

Cameron had originally planned to shoot on location in the Bahamas where the story was set but quickly realized that he needed to have a completely controlled environment because of the stunts and special visual effects involved.^[9] He considered shooting the film in Malta which had the largest unfiltered tank of water but it was not adequate enough.^[4] The film was shot at the Cherokee Nuclear Power Station outside of Gaffney, South Carolina. It had been abandoned after a local power company spent $700 million in construction.^[8] The underwater sequences were filmed in two specially constructed tanks. The first one held 7.5 million gallons of water, was 55 feet deep and 209 feet across. At the time, it was the largest fresh-water filtered tank in the world. Additional scenes were shot in the second tank which held 2.5 million gallons of water.^[9] As the production crew rushed to finish painting the main tank, millions of gallons of water poured in. It took five days to fill.^[10] The Deepcore rig was anchored to a 90-ton concrete column at the bottom of the large tank. It consisted of six partial and complete modules that took over half a year to plan and build from scratch.^[11]

The Remains of Deepcore

The two working craft, Flatbed and Cab One, were specially manufactured for the film by Can-Dive Services Ltd., a Canadian commercial diving company that specialized in "saturation" diving systems and underwater technology. Two million dollars was spent on set construction.^[6]

Principal photography

The main tank was not ready in time for the first day of principal photography. Cameron delayed filming for a week and pushed the smaller tank's schedule forward, demanding it be ready weeks before it was scheduled to be used.^[10] Filming eventually began on August 15, 1988, but there were still problems. On the first day of shooting in the main water tank, it sprang a leak and 150,000 gallons of water a minute rushed out.^[5] The studio brought in dam-repair experts to seal it. In addition, enormous pipes with elbow fittings had been improperly installed. There was so much water pressure traveling through them that the elbows blew off.^[5]

The principal underwater sequences were shot by Al Giddings, known for his work on The Deep.^[6] He used three cameras in watertight housings that he specially designed.^[11] Another special housing was designed for scenes that went from above-water dialogue to below-water dialogue. The filmmakers had to figure out how to keep the water clear enough to shoot and dark enough to look realistic at 2,000 feet, which was achieved by covering the top of the tank with an enormous tarpaulin.^[11] Cameron wanted to see the actors' faces and hear their dialogue and so he hired Western Space and Marine to engineer helmets which would remain optically clear underwater and installed state-of-the-art aircraft quality microphones into each helmet. Safety conditions were also a major factor with the installation of a decompression chamber on site, along with a diving bell and a safety diver for each actor.^[11]

The breathing fluid used in the film actually exists and was tested on a scientist who almost died.^[7][12] Over the last 20 years it has been tested on several animals which survived (including a rat, the scene being featured in some cuts of the film). Ed Harris held his breath inside a helmet full of liquid while being towed 30 feet below the surface of the large tank. He recalled that the worst moments were being towed with fluid rushing up his nose and his eyes swelling up.^[7] Actors played their scenes at 33 feet, too shallow a depth from them to need decompression and they rarely stayed down for more than an hour at a time. Cameron and the 26-person underwater diving crew sank to 50 feet and stayed down for five hours at a time. To avoid decompression sickness, they would have to hang from hoses halfway up the tank for as long as two hours, breathing pure oxygen.^[7]

The cast and crew endured over six months of grueling six-day, 70-hour weeks on an isolated set, creating enormous amounts of stress among the cast and crew. At one point, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio had a physical and emotional breakdown on the set and on another occasion, Ed Harris bursted into spontaneous sobbing while driving home. Cameron himself admitted, "I knew this was going to be a hard shoot, but even I had no idea just how hard. I don't ever want to go through this again".^[6] For example, the scene where portions of the rig are flooded with water, he realized that it was too dangerous and initially did not know how to minimize the danger. It took him four-and-a-half hours to set up the shot safely.^[7] Actor Leo Burmester said, "Shooting The Abyss has been the hardest thing I've ever done. Jim Cameron is the type of director who pushes you to the edge, but he doesn't make you do anything he wouldn't do himself".^[8] Lightning storms caused constant delays, including a 200-foot tear in the black tarpaulin covering the main tank.^[10] Repairing it would have taken too much time and so the production began shooting at night.^[13] In addition, blooming algae often reduced visibility to 20 feet within hours. Over-chlorination led to divers' skin burning and exposed hair being stripped off.^[13]

Some of the actors did not like the slow pace of filming. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio remembered, "We never started and finished any one scene in any one day".^[7] At one point, she became so frustrated with Cameron's style of directing that she walked off the set yelling, "We are not animals."^[13] Michael Biehn was frustrated by the waiting. He claimed that he was in South Carolina for five months and only acted for three to four weeks.^[7] He remembered one day being ten meters underwater and "suddenly the lights went out. It was so black I couldn't see my hand. I couldn't surface. I realized I might not get out of there".^[3] Harris said that the daily mental and physical strain was very intense and remembered, "One day we were all in our dressing rooms and people began throwing couches out the windows and smashing the walls. We just had to get our frustrations out".^[3] There were reports from South Carolina that the actor was so upset by the physical demands of the film and Cameron's dictatorial directing style that he said he would refuse to help promote the motion picture. Harris later denied this rumor and helped promote the film.^[7] Cameron responded to these complaints by saying, "For every hour they spent trying to figure out what magazine to read, we spent an hour at the bottom of the tank breathing compressed air".^[7] After 140 days and going four million dollars over budget, filming finally wrapped on December 8, 1988.^[13]

Post-production

To create the alien water tentacle or pseudopod, Cameron initially considered cel animation or a tentacle sculpted in clay and then animated via stop-motion techniques with water reflections projected onto it. Phil Tippett suggested Cameron contact Industrial Light & Magic.^[10] The special visual effects was divided up among seven FX divisions with motion control work by Dream Quest Images and computer graphics and opticals by ILM.^[6] ILM designed a program to produce surface waves of differing sizes and kinetic properties for the pseudopod.^[10] For the moment where it mimics Bud and Lindsey's faces, Ed Harris had eight of his facial expressions scanned while twelve of Mastrantonio's were scanned via software used to create computer-generated sculptures. The set was photographed from every angle and digitally recreated so that the pseudopod could be accurately composited into the live-action footage.^[10] The company spent six months to create 75 seconds of computer graphics needed for the creature. The film was to have opened on July 4, 1989 but its release was delayed for more than a month by production and special effects problems.^[7]

Studio executives were nervous about the film's commercial prospects when preview audiences laughed at scenes of serious intent. Industry insiders said that the release delay was because nervous executives ordered the film's ending completely re-shot. There was also a question of the size of the film's budget. One executive claimed $47 million^{[citation needed]} while The Wall Street Journal reported a figure of $60 million.^[14] Box office revenue tracker site The Numbers lists the production budget at $70 million.^[15] None of these figures include marketing or distribution costs.

Reaction

The Abyss was released on August 11, 1989 in 1,533 theaters where it grossed $9.3 million on its opening weekend. It went on to make $54.4 million in North America and $35.5 million in the rest of the world for a worldwide total of $90 million.^[16]

Critical reception

The Abyss was initially greeted with mixed response. Newsweek magazine's David Ansen wrote, "The payoff to The Abyss is pretty damn silly - a portentous deux ex machina that leaves too many questions unanswered and evokes too many other films".^[17] In her review for The New York Times, Caryn James claimed that the film had "at least four endings", and "by the time the last ending of this two-and-a-quarter-hour film comes along, the effect is like getting off a demon roller coaster that has kept racing several laps after you were ready to get off".^[18] Chris Dafoe, in his review for The Globe and Mail, wrote, "At its best, The Abyss offers a harrowing, thrilling journey through inky waters and high tension. In the end, however, this torpedo turns out to be a dud - it swerves at the last minute, missing its target and exploding ineffectually in a flash of fantasy and fairy-tale schtick".^[19]

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 the 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".^[20] USA Today gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, "Most of this underwater blockbuster is 'good,' and at least two action set pieces are great. But the dopey wrap-up sinks the rest 20,000 leagues".^[21] In her review for The Washington Post, Rita Kempley wrote that the film "asks us to believe that the drowned return to life, that the comatose come to the rescue, that driven women become doting wives, that Neptune cares about landlubbers. I'd sooner believe that Moby Dick could swim up the drainpipe".^[22] Conversely, Rolling Stone magazine's Peter Travers 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".^[23]

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."^[24] 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."^[25]

The film review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives The Abyss a "Certified Fresh" rating of 82%.^[26]

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. Denzel Washington won the award in the end.

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.^[27]"

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 Terminator 2: Judgment Day in 1991, Lightstorm Entertainment secured a five year, USD$500 million financing deal with 20th Century Fox for films produced, directed or written by Cameron.^[29] Within this contract, roughly $500,000 was allocated to complete The Abyss.^[30] 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. Captain Kidd Brewer died before he could return to reloop his dialog, and the Special Edition was therefore dedicated to his memory. 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. Both the theatrical and SE editions remain available on DVD.

References

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: The Abyss

• The Abyss at the Internet Movie Database
• The Abyss at Allmovie
• The Abyss at Rotten Tomatoes
• The Abyss at Box Office Mojo
• Abyss set visit at Gaffney by two fans
• Abyss set pictures at Gaffney with both air and ground shots
• Siskel & Ebert review of the Special Edition release on Laserdisc.
• Movieline interview with James Cameron on the making of The Abyss