thomas4cinema

I thought watching The Abyss again would bring me some of the Summer popcorn movie flavour that sadly I have been missing so much in this year’s real Summer popcorn movies – and the ones from the year before, and the year before… what it did, actually, was to remind me what a poor script writer Cameron is in most of his movies, and how much likes to bloat a perfectly simple action story into something messy, sticky and murky that runs for an hour too long. Ed Harris is, of course, great in The Abyss, as he is almost always, but he is entangled in stereotypical bad Navy Seals guys, dumb love back stories and an alien story that is just too Close Encounter to be of any interest in a 1989 movie. Of course it does not help that effects are not on a level that maybe would be required for such a film, with a bit of clumsy water tank action and a certainly at the time impressive water snake thing (paving the way for the T2 morphing action). The couple of good action scenes do not make up for the underwhelming majority of what you have to endure. And the grand finale is the worst of Spielberg without the best of Spielberg offsetting it, meaning kitsch and camp, hard to endure. http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/abyss/