The Abyss Profile
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This article is about the film. For other uses, see Abyss (disambiguation).
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 Joel Goodman
Distributed by 20th Century Fox Lightstorm Entertainment
Release date(s) August 9, 1989
Running time 146 min / (171 min) (special edition)
Country United States
Language English
Budget $69,500,000
Gross revenue $90,000,098
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile
The Abyss is a 1989 science fiction film which was written and directed by James Cameron, starring Ed Harris, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and Michael Biehn. The original music score was composed by Alan Silvestri. It was released on August 9, 1989 in the United States. Underwater scenes were filmed in the containment building of Cherokee Nuclear Power Plant (35.037° N 81.512° W), an unfinished nuclear power plant near Gaffney, South Carolina, in the United States. It took 26.5 million liters (seven million gallons) of water to fill the tank to a depth of 13 meters (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 sometimes 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. There is a novelization of The Abyss written by Orson Scott Card. A soundtrack was released by Varese Sarabande (VSD-5235.)
Contents
1 Plot 2 Critical reception 3 Conception 4 History of the Special Edition 5 Reception 6 Miscellanea 7 Budget and box office 9 References 10 External links
Plot An American ballistic missile submarine sinks near the edge of the Cayman Trough after an accidental encounter with an alien 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, and to mount operations from there. In a subplot, the SEAL team is accompanied down by the platform's designer, Lindsey Brigman (Mastrantonio). Her estranged husband, Virgil "Bud" Brigman (Harris) is the foreman of the platform. Unbeknownst to anyone, 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, the oil workers encounter an alien, but are uncertain what to make of it. The SEAL team recovers one of the nuclear warheads from the submarine, and plan to destroy the sub if salvage is impossible. Tension continues to mount as the platform loses contact with the surface, and then is nearly destroyed. After a pair of alien encounters, Coffey determines that the aliens are a threat, and decides to send the nuclear warhead down to the bottom of the trench where the aliens appear to come from. In a submersible-submersible confrontation, Lindsey and Virgil Brigman manage to kill Coffey, but cannot stop the nuclear time bomb from falling down the trench. With their craft damaged, Lindsey orders Bud to put the ship's sole diving suit on, and allow herself to drown so that she can be revived on the platform. Bud manages to save her life, and it seems that the estranged couple is back together. Bud then dons a suit incorporating a fluid breathing system to dive to the bottom of the trench and disarm the warhead. He does so, but his wife is shocked to learn that he doesn't have enough breathable liquid to return, and that he knew that the journey was suicide, but that someone had to do it. He transmits a final message saying that he loves her. The aliens find Virgil and bring him on to their ship. There, the aliens show him the message that he sent, and return him and the platform to the surface, unharmed. In the director's cut, the aliens, responding to man's warlike tendencies (displayed to Bud as news footage showing man's barbarism), are actually preparing to destroy all coastal regions of the world by giant megatsunamis. The aliens relent when they examine Virgil's final communication to his wife. This ending is very similar in style to the ending of The Day the Earth Stood Still.
Critical reception The Abyss was initially greeted with a lukewarm critical response. Its use of computer-generated special effects, however, was praised almost universally.
Conception
“ I was dive-certified at the age of seventeen and since then have always wanted to do something that incorporated filming and diving - I wanted to do the definitive diving movie. But what do you do? Show the beauties of the coral reef or the perils of killer sharks? Those films have already been done. What I wanted was to go into the realm that had always excited me the most because of its extremes and its absoluteness - I wanted to go deep into the ocean. In high school, I particpated in a weekly science seminar where different speakers were brought in to talk about everything from childbirth to the latest advances in physics. One of those speakers happened to be a commercial diver who had participated in an experiment in which he had breathed with a liquid in both lungs for something like forty-five minutes. That really blew my mind. Here was a guy who had used his lungs as a gill mechanism. From that seminar came the idea for a story I wrote about some scientists in a research installation on a cliff overlooking the Cayman Trough. Using liquid breathing suits, they began making forays into the deepest depths of the ocean - but no one who goes down the cliff comes back again.
”
“ What I originally wrote was a very, very crude and simple story dealing with the idea of being in the very deep ocean and doing fluid breathing and making a descent to the bottom from a staging submersible laboratory that was on the edge. Being on the brink of the bottomless pit, and the title, and the psychological ramifications of returning to the womb, breathing a liquid and falling to your death while simultaneously going back to your birth, much of that symbology is inherent in that first story. That was taken and layered upon and expanded. ”
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."
“ What emerges in the winnowing process is only the best stuff. And I think the overall caliber of the film is improved by that. I cut only two minutes of Terminator. On Aliens, we took out much more. I even reconstituted some of that in a special (TV) release version. The sense of something being missing on Aliens was greater for me than on The Abyss, where the film just got consistently better as the cut got along. The film must function as a dramatic, organic whole. When I cut the film together, things that read well on paper, on a conceptual level, didn't necessarily translate to the screen as well. I felt I was losing something by breaking my focus. Breaking the story's focus and coming off the main characters was a far greater detriment to the film than what was gained. The film keeps the same message intact at a thematic level, not at a really overt level, by working in a symbolic way.
”
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.
“ There were some beautiful scenes that were taken out. I just wish we hadn't shot so much that isn't in the film. ”
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 1992, Lightstorm Entertainment secured a five year, USD$500 million financing deal with 20th Century Fox for films produced, directed or written by Cameron.
Reception 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.
Miscellanea
Trivia sections are discouraged under Wikipedia guidelines. The article could be improved by integrating relevant items and removing inappropriate ones.
To cover himself in the event that the CGI "water tentacle" effect wasn't convincing, Cameron designed the sequence so that it could be cut from the film entirely if necessary without leaving any gaps in the story. The song One Night and the rest of the crew sing along to is Willin', written by Lowell George and performed by Linda Ronstadt. The film was censured 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. 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 struck 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. Mastrantonio blinks once during the scene, about a minute before she starts responding. 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, the diver that brought him air had the mouth piece upside down so as Ed Harris took a breath he also was breathing water.
Conversely, in Ensign Monk's demonstration of this fluid, the rat genuinely was breathing liquid fluorocarbon according to commentary in the DVD. The experiment was performed on-stage several times due to the rats defecating in the fluid, although they were not harmed in the course of the experiment.
Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and Ed Harris both refused to do press for the film and have publicly stated they'll never work with Cameron again. The preproduction was so secretive that the most anybody knew about the premise was it involved aliens underwater. Several cheap knockoff movies were quickly made to cash in on what was expected to be the blockbuster of the summer. Among these are Deepstar Six, Lords of the Deep and Leviathan. All were box office failures. In the end, those films resembled Cameron's previous Aliens more than The Abyss. The first three chapters of the novelisation by Orson Scott Card were background of the three main characters, Bud, Lindsey and Coffey. Harris and Mastrantonio were each given the chapters of Card's novelization describing their characters' background (which had not been published at the time) to understand their characters better. The 1988 pinball machine "Secret Service" appears in the movie. In the Special Edition version, according to imdb.com, the movie takes place in 1994. This is evident with the date (01/18/94) being shown on the ROV screen when the SEALS investigate the submarine.
Budget and box office
Estimated budget: $69,500,000
Opening weekend U.S. gross: $9,319,797 Total U.S. box office gross: $54,461,047 Foreign Box Office: $35,539,051
Cherokee Nuclear Power Plant
References
^ "The Writer/Director and Screenplay", The Abyss: Special Edition DVD
External links
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: The Abyss
The Abyss at the Internet Movie Database The Abyss screenplay at MovieScriptPlace.com Abyss quotes at MovieWavs.com Abyss set visit at Gaffney by two fans Abyss set pictures at Gaffney with both air and ground shots
v • d • e
Films and Television Shows by James Cameron
1970s-1980s Xenogenesis (1978) • Piranha II: The Spawning (1981) • The Terminator (1984) • Aliens (1986) • The Abyss (1989)
1990s Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) • True Lies (1994) • T2 3-D: Battle Across Time (1996) • Titanic (1997)
2000s Dark Angel (TV series) (2000-2002) • Expedition: Bismarck (2002) • Ghosts of the Abyss (2003) • Aliens of the Deep (2005) • Avatar (2009) • Battle Angel • The Dive
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The Abyss
The Abyss When a nuclear submarine sinks,a team of divers descends the depths to conduct a rescue mission and to determine the cause. Led by "Bud" Brigman (Ed Harris),the crew
