The Abyss
The Abyss is a 1989 American science fiction film written and directed by James Cameron and starring Ed Harris, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and Michael Biehn. When an American submarine sinks in the Caribbean, a US search and recovery team works with an oil platform crew, racing against Soviet vessels to recover the boat. Deep in the ocean, they encounter something unexpected.
For other uses, see Abyss (disambiguation).The Abyss
James Cameron
- Conrad Buff IV
- Joel Goodman
- Howard E. Smith
20th Century Fox[1]
- August 9, 1989
140 minutes[2]
United States
English
$43–47 million[nb 1]
$90 million[3]
The film was released on August 9, 1989, receiving generally positive reviews and grossed $90 million. It was nominated for four Academy Awards and won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.
Reception[edit]
Box office[edit]
The Abyss was released on August 9, 1989, in 1,533 theaters, where it grossed $9.3 million on its opening weekend and ranked #2 at the box office behind Parenthood. It went on to make $54.2 million in North America and $35.5 million throughout the rest of the world for a worldwide total of $89.8 million.[3]
Critical response[edit]
On Rotten Tomatoes, a review aggregator, The Abyss has an 89% approval rating based on 55 reviews and an average rating of 7.40/10. The critical consensus states: "The utterly gorgeous special effects frequently overshadow the fact that The Abyss is also a totally gripping, claustrophobic thriller, complete with an interesting crew of characters."[29] On Metacritic, the film has an average score of 62 out of 100, based on 14 critics indicating "generally favorable reviews".[30] The reviews tallied therein are for both the theatrical release and the Special Edition. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A-" on an A+ to F scale.[31]
David Ansen of Newsweek, summarizing the theatrical release, wrote, "The payoff to The Abyss is pretty damn silly — a portentous deus ex machina that leaves too many questions unanswered and evokes too many other films."[32] In her review for The New York Times, Caryn James wrote 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."[33] 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."[34] 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 phone home, he went surfing and fell off his board."[35] Mike Clark of 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."[36]
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."[37] Halliwell's Film Guide stated the film was, "despite some clever special effects, a tedious, overlong fantasy that is more excited by machinery than people."[38] Conversely, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone 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."[39] John Ferguson of Radio Times awarded it three stars out of five, stating "For some, this was James Cameron's Waterworld, a bloated, sentimental epic from the king of hi-tech thrillers. Some of the criticism was deserved, but it remains a fascinating folly, a spectacular and often thrilling voyage to the bottom of the sea [...] Cameron excels in cranking up the tension within the cramped quarters and the effects are awe-inspiring and deservedly won an Oscar. It's only marred by being overlong and by its sentimental attachment to aliens."[40]
The release of the Special Edition in 1993 garnered much praise. Each giving it thumbs up, Gene Siskel remarked, "The Abyss has been improved," and Roger Ebert added, "It makes the film seem more well rounded."[41] In the book Reel Views 2, James Berardinelli 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."[42]
Accolades[edit]
The Abyss won the 1990 Oscar for Best Visual Effects (John Bruno, Dennis Muren, Hoyt Yeatman, and Dennis Skotak). It was also nominated for:
Many other film organizations, such as the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, and the American Society of Cinematographers, also nominated The Abyss. The film ended up winning a total of three other awards from these organizations.[44]
Soundtrack[edit]
The soundtrack to The Abyss was written by Alan Silvestri and released by Varèse Sarabande on August 22, 1989.[45] In 2014, they issued a limited-edition (3,000 copies), two-disc album featuring the complete score minus the end credits medley, which is absent from both releases.
Home media[edit]
The first THX-certified LaserDisc title of the Special Edition Box Set was released in April 1993, in both widescreen and full-screen formats,[56] and it was a best-seller for the rest of the year. The Special Edition was released on VHS on August 20, 1996, as a part of Fox Video's Widescreen Series, with a seven-minute behind-the-scenes featurette with footage that did not appear in the Under Pressure: The Making of The Abyss documentary that was included on the Laserdisc and DVD releases.[57][58] The film was released on DVD in 2000 and contains both the theatrical (145 minutes) and Special Edition (171 minutes) versions of the film via seamless branching along with—on a second disc—the Laserdisc's extensive text, artwork and photographic documentation of the film's production, a ten-minute featurette, and the sixty-minute documentary Under Pressure: The Making of The Abyss.[59] The second disc was removed in subsequent reprints.
In 2014, the pay cable channels Cinemax and HBO began broadcasting both versions of the film in 1080p.[60][61] Netflix's UK service began offering the theatrical version in 1080p in 2017.[62] At an October, 2014 event James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd were asked about a future Blu-ray release for the film. Cameron gestured to the head of Fox Home Entertainment, implying the decision lay with the studio.[63] Five months later, another article suggested a spat between Cameron and 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment was responsible for the delay.[64] While promoting the upcoming 30th-anniversary Blu-ray release of Aliens at Comic-Con in San Diego in July 2016, James Cameron confirmed that he was working on a remastered 4K transfer of The Abyss and that it would be released on Blu-ray for the first time in early 2017. Cameron added, "We've done a wet-gate 4K scan of the original negative, and it's going to look insanely good. We're going to do an authoring pass in the DI for Blu-ray and HDR at the same time."[65]
In March 2019, digital intermediate colorist Skip Kimball posted a photo to his Instagram suggesting that he was working on the film. In November 2018, Cameron told Empire magazine that a Blu-ray transfer was "complete for my review" and he hoped it would be ready before 2019.[66]
In December 2021, during a promotional interview for the new book Tech Noir: The Art of James Cameron with website Space.com, director Cameron made the following statement: "Yeah, we finished the transfer and I wanted to do it myself because Mikael [Salomon] did such a beautiful job with the cinematography on that film. It is truly, truly gorgeous cinematography. That was before I started to assert myself in terms of lighting and asking the cinematographer to do certain things. I'd compose with the camera and choose the lenses, but I left the lighting to him. He did a remarkable job on that movie that I appreciate better now than I did even as we were making it ... So I just recently finished the high-def transfer a couple of months ago[,] so presumably there’ll be Blu-rays and it will stream with a proper transfer from now on. I appreciate what you said about the film. It didn't make much money in its day, but it does seem to be well-liked over time."[67]
In December 2022, journalist Arthur Cios tweeted that, during an interview for Avatar: The Way of Water, he asked Cameron about a 4K release of The Abyss and that Cameron had told him "he had a new master and it would be out by March 2023 max."[68][69] However, Cameron conceded in January 2023 that a 4K release would be pushed back to the "second half of 2023" alongside True Lies.[70] Cameron premiered the completed 4K remaster at Beyond Fest in September 2023 and said new home video releases were coming in "a couple of months".[71] Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment released the film on Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray on March 12, 2024.[72] Along with including both cuts, the set has several new special features and includes all of the special features from the previous 2000 DVD release.[73] A United Kingdom release for the 4K restoration was cancelled due to Cameron's refusal to cut the rat breathing liquid scene.[74]
Adaptations[edit]
American science fiction author Orson Scott Card was hired to write a novelization of the film based on the screenplay and discussions with Cameron.[75] He wrote back-stories for Bud, Lindsey, and Coffey as a means not only of helping the actors define their roles, but also to justify some of their behavior and mannerisms in the film. Card also wrote the aliens as a colonizing species which preferentially sought high-pressure deep-water worlds to build their ships as they traveled further into the galaxy (their mothership was in orbit on the far side of the Moon). The NTIs' knowledge of neuroanatomy and nanoscale manipulation of biochemistry was responsible for many aspects of the film.
A licensed interactive fiction video game based on the script was being developed for Infocom by Bob Bates, but was cancelled when Infocom was shut down by its then-parent company Activision.[76] Sound Source Interactive later released an action video game in 1998 entitled The Abyss: Incident at Europa. The game takes place a few years after the film, where the player must find a cure for a deadly virus.[77]
A two-issue comic book adaptation was published by Dark Horse Comics.[78]