The Abyss

You might remem­ber this 1989 James Came­ron movie.

Yeah that one. I caught up with it about half­way through last night, and I don’t think I’d seen it in maybe a dozen years. I remem­ber having wan­ted to like it as a kid, as I was into stuff like aliens and Atlan­tis, but I also remem­ber fee­ling as though the under­wa­ter inte­lli­gen­ces were hardly empha­si­zed, almost as an afterthought, and that the main plot revol­ved around some boring adult drama stuff blah blah Cold War. And also that the ending was horribly unsatisfying.

Man, I was right, espe­cially about the ending. Okay so the final plot point is that Ed Harris needs to go like four miles dee­per than their sub­ma­rine already is, by him­self, in just a diving suit whose hel­met won’t implode because it’s filled with pink breathing fluid ins­tead of air. They claim that it’s simi­lar to the stuff you breathed “for nine months” in the womb, but I thought oxy­gen was sup­plied by the umbi­li­cal cord? At any rate, down he goes, until he’s gree­ted by one of these non-terrestrial inte­lli­gen­ces who just kind of glows and blinks at him for a while before taking his hand and lea­ding him to this grand under­wa­ter city.

Ear­lier we had seen what we assu­med to be a ship belon­ging to these guys, though it was fluid and see­mingly bio­lu­mi­nes­cent. One of the crew had sug­ges­ted that “their whole tech­no­logy” is based on mani­pu­la­ting water, so okay, I can sus­pend belief enough for that, it’s a cool idea any­way. So as Ed Harris and this alien are caree­ning through this under­wa­ter city we ima­gine, Okay, maybe these skyscraper-like struc­tu­res are made of water, whether they freeze it or other­wise fix it mole­cu­larly by ioni­zing it or something?, look, I’m not a chemist.

So these crea­tu­res pro­vide a little bubble-room for Ed Harris to breathe in. Ever­yone up in the sub thinks he’s dead because his fluid was sche­du­led to run out of oxy­gen. They’re repor­ting this to the sur­face, where a big tan­ker thing is about to res­cue them, when Ed starts typing more mes­sa­ges to them on his power glove. “Made some new friends down here” or something. “Keep your pantyhose on. You’re gonna love this.” Then there are all these tre­mors, and Chris Elliott is on sonar going “It’s everywhere!, it’s everywhere!”, until finally what appears to be the whole under­wa­ter city sur­fa­ces, its big skysc­ra­pers revea­led to be made of nothing more than pur­ple mol­ded plas­tic. Every­body just kind of grins at how pretty it is, see­mingly not slightly fazed by it, then Ed Harris and what’s-her-name kiss, then the cre­dits roll.

So you’re left won­de­ring a million things: Did their whole under­wa­ter city rise up, or was it just some craft? Why is their city made of pur­ple mol­ded plas­tic? Where are the crea­tu­res at this point? Within some pres­su­ri­zed tank in the depths of the city/craft? Assu­ming that they evol­ved totally inde­pen­dently of us, and are essen­tially deep-ocean “aliens,” how would they sur­vive sur­fa­cing like that? Surely they didn’t just send their city up to show every­body while they remai­ned down there. Are they more inte­lli­gent than us? Have they known about us all along? If so, why is a brief encoun­ter watching Ed Harris cough up some pink fluid impe­tus enough for them to finally reveal them­sel­ves? If not, why aren’t they sca­red shit­less by us? And isn’t sur­fa­cing your whole damn under­wa­ter city kind of a gra­ce­less way to announce your exis­tence? What the hell hap­pens in the hour follo­wing the end of the movie? Everything I desc­ri­bed hap­pens in the space of about five minu­tes, isn’t that kind of rushed for events that are so sig­ni­fi­cant? It’s just so lac­klus­ter. In real life we’d have just ack­now­led­ged their exis­tence, then slowly star­ted sen­ding down gold records to intro­duce them to Billie Holi­day and the deci­mal num­ber sys­tem and other things that define us as a species.

And how am I expec­ted to care about some para­noid Red-scared Navy guy with a nuke when there are god damn ALIENS around? What do you want this movie to be about, any­way? Sub­plots are sup­po­sed to be less overwhel­ming than that, just something to help give the main plot momen­tum, like Paul Rei­ser in Aliens wan­ting to become rich off the alien spe­ci­mens. That sub­plot threw a mon­key wrench into things like it should have; the nukes thing in The Abyss is just a dis­trac­tion and an anno­yance. It’s like stic­king a globe-threatening meteor into The Exor­cist; I’m trying to watch a movie about a damn exor­cism here, take your stu­pid meteor elsewhere.

Inde­pen­dently evol­ved deep-sea inte­lli­gence is a great science fic­tion pre­mise, why did it have to be was­ted on such a crappy movie.