It may be better down where it's wetter but it's also a heck of a lot more dangerous. Just ask the submarine crew tasked with transporting a bunch of nuclear warheads. They were just minding their own business when suddenly a bright violet light emerged and sent them on a crash course with a rock structure. Now stuck at the bottom of the ocean, a crew of divers are being sent to recover any surviving crew members. Virgil "Bud" Brigman (Ed Harris) is bringing his own crew of divers to the scene alongside a group of Navy SEALS, led by Hiram Coffey (Michael Biehn), the latter of whom have their own orders to follow. Also along for the ride Dr. Lindsey Brigman (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), Bud's ex-wife.
The Abyss many traits you'd find in any James Cameron movies, including the fact that this guy is obsessed with the ocean. But The Abyss, how Cameron, whose more fascinated with visual effects and technology than maybe any other filmmaker, doesn't forget the all-important human element of his costly endeavors. If Cameron could just spend his days in a submarine away from the rest of human civilization, I bet he would. When directors like George Lucas and Peter Jackson became too enamored with VFX technology, they ended up creating cold works that lost the heart that made earlier directorial efforts work. Cameron's works don't pulsate with the humanity of films by Agnes Varda or Ava DuVernay, but they do tend to use all their VFX wizardry in service of human beings rather than as a replacement for human characters entirely.
Cameron's clearly just as enamored with the central love story of Titanic as he is with all the groundbreaking VFX work while an R-rated action chase movie like Terminator 2: Judgement Day dedicates plenty of time to fleshing out the friendship between a young John Connor and a T-800. Similarly, The Abyss, in its most memorable sequence, finds Virgil, Lindsey and their crew bonding over an encounter with a water tentacle (brought to life through CGI that looks shockingly good thirty-one years later). There's an endearingly wholesome quality to this scene, one that Cameron refuses to undercut with gratuitous jokes or action beat. Cameron so fully commits to a sense of communal awe between the characters that the audience can't help but be similarly astonished.
It's the kind of intimate scene that so many blockbusters tend to eschew. Meanwhile, the way this sequence uses VFX at this disposal of the emotions of the live-action characters demonstrates how Cameron doesn't forget humanity even when pushing the boundaries of visual effects work. A thrilling climax where Bud travels to the farthest depths of the ocean to disarm a warhead similarly thrives thanks to this human element. Keeping things restrained to just Bud having to face a dwindling amount of oxygen and his inability to parse out differently colored wires means the relationship between Bud and Lindsey doesn't get lost in the shuffle. A subsequent scene showing Bud encountering an underwater alien city makes use of extraordinary visual effects work registers as all the more impressive in 2020.
Every movie nowadays makes use of green-screen work for their backgrounds. How were Cameron and company able to pull all this with a far more limited visual effects toybox off back in 1989? Unfortunately, not all of The Abyss is dedicated to Cameron spotlighting human beings in the middle of VFX-heavy environments. Much of the film, particularly in the first and second acts, is just dedicated to dialogue exchanges between Virgil and his drill team. It's admirable how Cameron, in writing his human characters, is motivated by old-fashioned notions of grandiose romances and equally bombastic gestures of self-sacrifice. It's less admirable how his dialogue, both here in The Abyss and throughout all of his films, tends to be tin-eared.
I'm not sure if any non-comedy could have pulled off an adult character using "Weiner" as an insult but the script for The Abyss most certainly cannot. Whereas other James Cameron movies have sweeping romance or propulsive chase scenes to make dialogue-based issues less of a problem, The Abyss traps the viewer with these characters in confined spaces for prolonged periods of time. Unless aliens are showing up, our focus is entirely on Virgil, Lindsay and company and that makes it all the more apparent how clumsy their dialogue is. The Abyss at least delivers the goods when it comes to impressive visual effects work, but Cameron's recurring tendency for poor dialogue and overly long runtimes work as an anchor to drag The Abyss down from reaching its fullest potential.
Addendum: I would die for Hippy and especially his pet rat, that rat was so cute!
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