Two former married oil engineers are tasked with helping the US naval superiors during a highly secretive recovery process, each doing a good job. However, a nuclear ambush was set up and the submarine sank mysteriously into the deepest waters. Immediately afterwards, the search for the submarine begins with a civilian crew charged with searching for the sunken submarine to find the missing and rescue them, but they will face some difficulties through the emergence of a strange species and may cause a certain risk.
The attempt to extract the essences of several genres (cold-war submarine thriller, love story, Disney fantasy, pseudomystical SF in the Spielberg mode) and mix them together ultimately leads to giddy incoherence.
TV Guide
June 06, 2007
What ultimately saves the film are its extraordinary sets and phenomenal Oscar-winning visual effects.
The Abyss gains in some ways from its own Achilles heels, in a way most movies don't... its formal technique, its reckless obsessiveness, and its gutsy emotionalism are what I can't stop turning over in my mind.
As a follow-up to Cameron's great sci-fi Aliens, The Abyss is too verbose for an actioner and the special effects, striking as they are, are not well integrated into the narrative, but it's still worth seeing.
The movie was a bear to make and it shows onscreen, parading around a series of mesmerizing set-pieces that look deliciously hard-earned in ways our current CG-drenched filmmaking climate never allows.
Anyone looking for a discouraging word about this stupendously exciting and emotionally engulfing film should read no further. The Abyss confirms James Cameron as a world-class filmmaker.
ColeSmithey.com
May 11, 2007
Great blending of spectacle and drama.
Antagony & Ecstasy
December 14, 2009
One need not be a Cameron acolyte to recognise that The Abyss has aged better than some of the films that outshone it back in the day.
Colossally ambitious, this logistically boggling and technically brilliant film from writer-director James Cameron is a visual tour de force, featuring overall, the greatest underwater sequences ever seen on film.
