The Abyss: James Cameron's Most Brilliant Failure

The Abyss was released in 1989 with a tremendous hype, with James Cameron's most ambitious film till then. Expectations for this film were high as Cameron had some good run with the success of Terminator and Aliens. This underwater sci-fi, set on an oil rig, stands out with great conviction among Cameron's extensive body of work, despite some minor narrative and cinematic shortcomings.

This is almost solely thanks to its gigantic scope and thought-provoking ideas about human nature and our relationship with alien life.

Let's begin with what The Abyss did best: its astonishing specialized achievements still hold up remarkably well today. The aquatic filming, achieved through innovative ways like “wet diving” suits, places the spectator right amid the action.

We feel the pressing weight and disorientation of the deep with the characters. The visual upshot, particularly the water-rested elementals, avoided the cheesiness of previous submarine aliens through initiating digital and practical approaches.

The production also pushed limits. Mr. Cameroon mixed real props with early digital tricks, and it paid off. Then there’s that monstrous water tank they built, one of the biggest ever, letting him stage scenes that suck you into this alien sea world. After Aliens, it’s Cameron’s most “you are there” moment—like stepping off a cliff into the unknown.

This isn’t just a gearhead’s playground, though. The Abyss marks the moment Cameron stops flexing pure muscle and starts digging into something meatier. He’d been all about tough guys and big guns in Terminator and Aliens, but here, he flips the script. It’s less “kill or be killed,” more “who are we, really?”

This film’s a bridge in his career (with the Avatar saga), still got the roughneck heroes and military swagger, but now he’s poking holes in the whole “soldiers as saviors” vibe.

It was with The Abyss that Cameron first challenged prior assumptions about portraying the military in an unambiguously heroic light. The ambitious underwater thriller follows a civilian crew of deep-sea oil drillers recruited by the Navy to mount a daring salvage operation to rescue any survivors after a mysterious accident cripples and sinks a U.S. nuclear submarine.

Led by the estranged formerly married couple of Bud Brigman (Ed Harris) and Lindsey (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), the rig crew is joined by a platoon of Navy SEALs headed by Michael Biehn's Lieutenant Coffey.

On the surface, the archetypal character dynamics from Terminator and Aliens are still present - you have the blue-collar civilian hero crew, the military presence of the gung-ho SEALs, the scruffy yet sensitive everyman in Bud, and the tough, no-nonsense woman in Lindsey.

But it's the nature of the mysterious threat they face that signals a major shift in how Cameron portrays characters, the military, and humanity itself.

The real danger here is not some outer-space freak show, it’s the ugly, twisted depravity buried deep within all of us, all mangled up by paranoia. Cameron kicks things off with this heavy Nietzsche jab: “If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

And damn, does he make it stick. The crew’s down there, eyeballing the black heart of the ocean, but what’s really looking back is anything but the water, it’s the roughest, rawest pieces of themselves, glaring right through the murk.

The crushing water pressure surrounding them at all times serves not just as a physical danger, but a metaphorical one, separating them from any sense of communication or outside support. Trapped alone in this environment of isolation and dread, the psychologies of key characters begin to erode and devolve.

While Cameron maintains the movie's visceral action and adventure firmly rooted in the perilous underwater setting, his scripted narrative also keeps cutting back to escalating military tensions topside between the U.S. and Soviet Union over the downed sub that threatens to spark an outright nuclear war. It's here that Cameron's broader humanist viewpoints and social commentary become most apparent.

The desperate struggle for survival and sanity playing out aboard the Deep Core rig begins to function as a microcosm and literalized metaphor for the collective madness of the perpetual militaristic brinksmanship and escalating tensions between nations and ideologies during the Cold War era.

Spoilers ahead!

When the human crew encounters an advanced aquatic alien civilization (dubbed “NTIs” - Non-Terrestrial Intelligence), the warm-blooded blue-collar workers and the logical engineer Lindsey recognize their benevolence.

But the suspicious, paranoid military mindset of the SEALs, epitomized by Michael Biehn's unraveling Lieutenant Coffey, sees only dangerous threats and potential for destructive violence. It's a clear allegory for how differing cultural worldviews and belief systems can shape diametrically opposed perceptions of the very same reality.

After a tense showdown between the two camps, with the military ultimately attempting to destroy the NTI city with a nuclear warhead they had primed, Bud undertakes a perilous journey into the abyss to disarm the bomb and narrowly avoids disaster.

In the process, he is briefly “abducted” and introduced to the NTIs' spectacular underwater metropolis. It's here he learns that this ancient alien race has been monitoring humanity's dangerous nuclear brinkmanship from the shadows for some time.

Alarmed by humanity's reckless descent into the potential self-destruction of all life on Earth, the NTIs had initially resolved to exterminate the human race as a threat. But in an astonishing climax, the aliens witness the love and selfless heroism between Bud and Lindsey that renews their faith in the underlying decency and potential of humanity.

As a gesture of power but also measured mercy, the NTIs generate colossal tidal waves to rise up across all coastlines before receding back harmlessly into the ocean; a stark but non-lethal demonstration of their godlike abilities over nature, and a sobering reminder that humanity is but a small, fragile part of a much vaster living system on this planet.

Where the military was depicted as fundamentally heroic and life-preserving in Cameron's earlier films fighting against threatening “others” like the Terminator and Xenomorphs, in The Abyss it is the distrustful, paranoid military mindset that is the primary force risking global destruction against a peaceful non-human intelligence.

The real heroes are the two troubled divorcees who transcend their acrimonious past to rediscover their love and faith in both themselves and a greater cosmic order that makes them reaffirm the core decency within humanity.

As Lindsey says to Bud while contemplating the NTIs' intentions: “We all see what we want to see. Coffey looks and he sees hate and fear. You have to look with better eyes than that.” It's this idea that what we perceive and project onto the universe is a reflection of our own inner state of being.

The abyss - whether a literal undersea trench or a psychological/philosophical chasm separating people and fostering distrust of that which is unknown or unfamiliar - can only be overcome by embracing it rather than fearfully turning away. We must find the courage to peer deep into the darkness and face what lies within ourselves and each other to evolve and grow.

Where The Abyss struggles is in meeting the high expectations set by its visionary technical accomplishments. The ambitious plot, involving military intervention, hostages, love interests, and First contact with intelligent sea creatures-quickly becomes convoluted. Character moments feel perfunctory to serve the complex script mechanics. While the cast give their all, none leave a lasting impression besides Ed Harris' descent into madness.

Tonal inconsistencies plague the film. Comedy relief amidst life-or-death scenarios feels misjudged. A romance thrown into the mix never sparks. The most flawed commotion has to be the climactic messages about human nature feel muddled compared to Cameron's trademark clarity. For a film dealing with big ideas, the conclusion raises more questions than answers.

After The Abyss, Cameron became a different, more philosophically and emotionally engaged filmmaker while still working in the muscular action movie genre. The Terminator 2 examined how the dehumanizing effects of violence and hatred could degrade character and spirituality, while empathy and care could elevate machine intelligence to something resembling a soulful grasp of humanity.

True Lies pushed back on traditional masculinist action movie tropes. Titanic stripped away any sci-fi alien metaphors to directly examine humanity's perpetual hubris in the face of nature's incomprehensible power. Avatar told another story of a protagonist finding their best self by embracing a culture and worldview alien to their initial preconceptions.

The Abyss is a spectacular technical achievement that remains unparalleled, but one dragged down by an overeager script trying to do too much. It shows Cameron's immense ambition and thirst for innovation, even if the storytelling doesn't fully satisfy.

While deeply imperfect, its vision of alien wonders beneath the waves and questions of humanity's place in the cosmos still resonate today. The Abyss stands as James Cameron's most brilliant box office-failure, one that pushed cinema to its limits in the name of speculative imagination. It is a rare technicolor masterpiece with flaws fascinating to explore. It's one of those rare films that you'd be yearning to see on a giant screen with state-of-the-art sound system.