Animal Action
Blackmail, Murder & Mayhem
Blaxploitation
Classics
Comic Action
Crime
Cult Classics
Disaster Films
Espionage
Futuristic
General
Hong Kong Action
Jungle Action
Kids & Teens
Martial Arts
Military & War
Romantic Adventure
Science Fiction
Sea Adventure
Series & Sequels
Superheroes
Swashbucklers
Television
Thrillers
|
 |
The Abyss (Special Edition) |
List Price: $26.98
Your Price: |
 |
|
|
|
| Product Info |
Reviews |
Features:
- Color
- Closed-captioned
- THX
- Widescreen
- Box set
- Dolby
Description:
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
|
|
|
|
