Owned version: The 2000 Fox two-disc DVD release with all the fancy bells and whistles - the height of turn-of-the-century tech. (18 years later and jesus does this ever need a new release that takes advantage of the advances in technology vis-a-vis data storage, image restoration and seamless branching.)
Acquired: Likely in late 2000 or early 2001 from CostCo.
Seen before?: Never for the director's cut. Twice for the theatrical - once on August 10th or 11th of 1989 in a theater, and once from this disc on March 2nd of 2010. (The latter resulted in this awful review.)
Not sure why I was in such an evidently foul mood the last time I saw The Abyss, as judging from that writeup linked above. I assume I just wasn't framing it in the right way mentally - this is a dry run for what Cameron would later accomplish with Titanic, in all ways. It has the spectacle and the complicated setpieces full of gushing water, but it also has the old-school guileless melodrama, here kept grounded by a roughneck reticence. Maybe that's why I didn't go for it the last time - the directness of the blue-collar characters initially seems contrapuntal to the sort of emotional territory Cameron treads. But then, that's a feature and not a bug - the avoidance of swooning emotion in favor of the direct necessity of action is true to the milieu, and it makes the later parts of the film, where the dams burst free, connect with that much more force.
It also maybe helps that I watched Cameron's preferred cut this time around in addition to the theatrical release. The theatrical version, in the name of recouping costs and squeezing in an additional showing per day, runs about 2 hours and 20 minutes, where the director's cut runs an extra half-hour. While the released version has most of the necessary beats and is in general fairly lean for something of that length, it often feels a bit abrupt, as though its concessions to that dominant directness stripped it a touch too close to the bone - the relationship between Hippy and his rat feels more developed than that of the estranged Brigmans. The director's cut restores a lot of small character moments (like a bit where Bud and Lindsey discuss Lindsey's last boyfriend, a "suit" deliberately set apart from the proles underwater) that shore up and deepen the character work in ways that the actors alone are only able to allude towards, and it shows that Cameron once again almost never wastes a frame of space even at epic lengths. But while a lot of the trims are things that only improve the material (I especially mourn the loss of the marvelous shot pulling away from an overwhelmed, fraying Michael Biehn gazing out a portal window and down into the darkness of the trench - the abyss looking into him, indeed), a couple of them do make sense as a way to curtail perceived redundancies. Chief among these is the winnowing down of the scene where the rig crew watches the news regarding the sunken nuclear submarine they've been sent to investigate and the aftermath of its sinking. Where the theatrical sticks mainly to the "facts" of the sub sinking and the Cold-War tensions stoked by it, the DC continues on to detail another ship collision between an American destroyer and a Russian craft that is viewed as retaliatory by the Russians. This was, in the end, an unnecessary flourish/parallel to the Cuban Missile Crisis (especially as Hippy later comes right out and names the situation as a new version of the Kennedy-era historical event), and its removal harms the film not. Yet it did clarify and bring me to something regarding the film, its setting and its placement in late-Cold War history.
In that earlier, crappy review, I broke the film down to "cranky characters in cold, leaky places waiting for something to happen." This time through, it occurs to me that this may be part of the design. If we allow this as a late-breaking piece of Cold War art, drawing inspiration from '50s dramaturgy in more ways than one, the setting begins to seem not just instructive but imperative. Yes, it takes forever for anything to happen down there because the water and attendant pressure turn everything into a waiting game. When the topside crane collapses, all anyone on the rig can do is watch it fall and hope it doesn't cause too much damage to the rig. When characters get into the submersibles and chase other characters or attack them with the loading arms, the objects of the attack can only maneuver so much to minimize the impact. Any impact beyond a glancing blow can cause explosive hull breaches that lead to drownings, crushing, explosions. So. What we have is a number of people, ordinary people, thrust into a pressure-cooker situation by military and government forces who care not about their well-being, who desperately just want to get in and do their job and go home, who see bad things coming miles away and are helpless to avoid or stop them, who know that any show of force whether deliberate or accidental will have catastrophic results... well, you tell me. Are we on the ocean floor or in the middle of Cold War gamesmanship?
The director's cut more or less insists on that reading, right down to an ending that reveals The Abyss as having been a stealth remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still the whole time, whereas the theatrical merely leaves that there for you to figure out. Without the Cold-War reading, though, this still works, especially in its late stages, as seeing a tragedy occur to a loved one in front of you and being unable to assist. So even in the abbreviated version, there's a lot going on here. Cameron, as always, is an extraordinary visualist and a technical wizard. The early exploration of the sunken nuclear sub is an analog wonder; foregrounded floating debris and diffuse backlighting add an unearthly quality appropriate to a tale of underwater aliens, while the creaks and clicks and hisses and bubbles and random white noise on the soundtrack, underlined by a minimal score, add a fine mixture of awe and apprehension into it. The Abyss often works like an underwater explorer, moving slowly but surely towards its next striking, summatory image - a door exploding off its hinges during a hull breach and creaming a poor rig worker; an imploding submersible releasing one large bubble, floating to the surface like a soul escaping; Lindsey gasping for breath and hugging the sides of Bud's helmet in a magnificent meshing of tenderness and tech. That last image feels like a keystone for Cameron in general, and it makes sense thusly that the film should really kick into gear when Bud has to go down into the abyss the melodrama is allowed to reach full throat. Mastrantonio gets a couple big actorly speechs - the "two candles in the dark" one in particular - and goes for it, wringing the maximum amount of pathos out of this sudden flood of distressed emotion; her need to keep talking is satisfying from a narrative standpoint (the whole film prior to this has been about men trying to downplay or silence her, to the point of Biehn's villain taping her mouth shut) and also as a counterpoint to Harris's inability to communicate in any way other than slow typing on a wrist-mounted keyboard. His clumsy brevity set against the verbal torrents she uses to keep him focused and alive is wrenching, Cameron-style maximalism at its most emotionally brutal. In his hands, underwater works to unleash the waterworks.
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