The Abyss (1989)
Directed by James Cameron
A civilian oil rig crew is recruited to conduct a search and rescue effort when a nuclear submarine mysteriously sinks. One diver soon finds himself on a spectacular odyssey 25,000 feet below the ocean's surface where he confronts a mysterious force that has the power to change the world or destroy it.
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8 films that influenced The Abyss
What critics say influenced The Abyss
The difference between the two cuts throughout this passage (the first 100 minutes of the theatrical cut, the first two hours of the extended version) is largely one of tone: in both cases, there's a certain stretched-out observational feel that suggests, especially considering what happens later, that Cameron was trying to make his very own 2001: A Space Odyssey (that Stanley Kubrick film was also visually referenced several times in Aliens), following with a certain detachment as people try to go about their very high-tech business as Something Paranormal is flitting about just where you can't see it, but the extended cut benefits from stretching out the stretching-out with a bevy of added character details.
Biehn's other Cameron credits are The Terminator, T2 (where he had a cameo that was cut from the theatrical release but restored in the special edition), and The Abyss.
Without it, Cameron likely never gets the chance to make “The Abyss,” which denies him the chance to work on the special effects that make “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” so incredible (or worse, “T2” is directed by someone else entirely).
As in their box office hit Aliens, producer Gale Anne Hurd and Cameron’s latest opus rests on a simple, war story-style plot.
James Cameron’s follow-up to his stunning work on “Aliens” was a huge target of gossip and expectation that summer, pulling up to theaters after enduring a full year of mysterious set reports and industry speculation, where it was made abundantly clear that Cameron was swinging for the fences with this feature.
James Cameron 's follow-up to Aliens abandons deep space for the spacey deep, and hits rock bottom as the submarine genre meets Close Encounters.
Chances are you've seen James Cameron's sea epic "The Abyss," because chances are you've seen James Cameron's space epic, "Aliens."
Consider James Cameron's The Abyss, which also employed alien intervention to urge peace between nations - that's a case where the message folds nicely into the overall storyline, rather than seeming tacked-on, as it does in 2010.
Has the same exact motivation as the aliens in James Cameron's The Abyss .
Writer and director James Cameron ("Aliens"/"The Abyss"/"Titanic") hit the jackpot with this low-budget sleeper hit, and did a first-class job with the fast pacing, finely devised special effects and all the quirky heart-pounding action sequences.
We exhale — finally, deeply, loudly — at the end of such films as “Aliens” and “The Abyss” because we’ve accompanied their characters to absolute extremes of fury and fragility, and emerged on the other side.
Cameron’s use of a love story underlying an action film -- which he would repeat in virtually all of his films from The Abyss to Titanic to True Lies -- makes it raw and emotional.
The available James Cameron SE DVDs ( The Abyss , T2) aren't my favourite deluxe packages because they boast of too many text-based supplementals--one sits before a television to get away from reading.
Director Jim Cameron and producer Gale Anne Hurd, creators of "The Terminator" and "Aliens," seemed unstoppable.
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I said that Cameron wanted to make his own 2001; but he really wanted to make his own Close Encounters of the Third Kind , if some of the particular images he copied from that film are any indication.
While it may take awhile for the Star Wars generation — used to the Mach-speed zaps of outer space adventures — to adjust to the slower underwater action, The Abyss is no less riveting.
Documentaries takes you to a ten-minute featurette from 1989 and its more candid 1992 counterpart, Under Pressure, a 60-minute retrospective on what was deemed back then "the hardest shoot in history" (more difficult than Apocalypse Now?).
The Abyss might have had an absurd price tag in terms in both financial and human terms, but you cannot say that we don't see that $70 million on the screen, in all of the fantastic underwater footage, great models, and most notably, a really stunning and groundbreaking use of CGI courtesy of Industrial Light and Magic, bringing to life a semi-sentient tentacle of water snaking through Deep Core - it was, after Willow , only the second use of CGI morphing in cinema history, and what was insanely cool in 1989 still holds up exceedingly well today - am I alone in noticing that computer-generated effects in the early years, such as here, or in Terminator 2 or Jurassic Park , look infinitely more convincing than the effects in movies from 2002 or 2003?