The Abyss

Adventure, Science Fiction, Action

Ed Harris	Virgil Brigman
Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio	Lindsey Brigman
Michael Biehn	Lt. Coffey
Leo Burmester	Catfish De Vries
Todd Graff	Alan Carnes
John Bedford Lloyd	Jammer Willis
J.C. Quinn	Arliss Dawson
Kimberly Scott	Lisa Standing
Leo Burmeister	Catfish De Vries
Captain Kidd Brewer Jr.	Lew Finler

Director	James Cameron
Producer	Van Ling; Gale Anne Hurd
Writer	James Cameron
Cinematography	Mikael Salomon
Musician	Alan Silvestri

Meticulously crafted but also ponderous and predictable, James Cameron's 1989 deep-sea close-encounter epic reaffirms one of the oldest first principles of cinema: everything moves a lot more slowly underwater. Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, as formerly married petroleum engineers who still have some "issues" to work out, are drafted to assist a gung-ho Navy SEAL (Michael Biehn) with a top-secret recovery operation: a nuclear sub has been ambushed and sunk, under mysterious circumstances, in some of the deepest waters on earth, and the petro-techies have the only submersible craft capable of diving down that far. Every image and every performance is painstakingly sharp and detailed (and the computerized water creatures are lovely) but the movie's lumbering pace is ultimately lethal. It's the audience that ends up feeling waterlogged. For a guy who likes guns as much as Cameron (his next film after all, was the body-count masterpiece Terminator 2: Judgment Day), it's interesting that the moral balance here is weighted heavily in favor of the can-do engineers; the military types are end-justifies-the-means amoralists, just like the weasely government bureaucrats in Aliens. --David Chute