The Abyss Review

Cameron drowned his cast in a flooded nuclear containment building in South Carolina for months, and the misery is documented well enough that it colours everything you see. What he got for it is a genuine sense of pressure and dark, a submerged world that feels like it would kill you, and the single best sequence he has ever staged, Ed Harris trying to shock his ex wife's heart back into rhythm while shouting at a corpse. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio's meltdown during that day of shooting is legend and the take is on screen.

The water tentacle that mimics faces was the first convincing computer generated character in a feature and it still reads cleanly. The problems are structural. The theatrical cut removes the tidal wave material that explains why the deep sea creatures intervene at all, which leaves the last twenty minutes as a soft glow of goodwill with no argument under it, and Michael Biehn's unravelling officer is a stock device. It is a great film with its motive removed and a merely good one restored.