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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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time
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081489
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08148900.039
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1990-09-17
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CINEMA, Page 79Water Bomb
THE ABYSS
Directed and Written by James Cameron
Water is not the director's friend. Actors immersed in it do
not have many opportunities for sharp repartee. It provides no
cover for the villain to sneak up on the hero. It turns action
sequences into exercises in slow motion. It is costly to work in
and obscures expensive and imaginative special-effects work.
All of this having been made obvious by dozens of subaqueous
movies, one has to wonder why James Cameron, whose Aliens and The
Terminator were among the smartest and most frugally made recent
entertainments, plunged into the $50 million-plus Abyss. Or, if he
was sending his cast on a dive into a bottomless ocean trough, why
he didn't at least arrange to have a monster paddle up to meet
them.
The situation seems promising. A nuclear submarine has a
mysterious accident at the edge of an ocean canyon, and the only
hope for rescue is the crew of a futuristic underwater oil-drilling
rig working nearby. The rig's designer (Mary Elizabeth
Mastrantonio), who is the estranged wife of its master (Ed Harris),
drops down to help and bicker. So does a Navy diving team whose
leader (Michael Biehn) suffers a psychotic break caused by the
great depths. He becomes particularly obstreperous after he
recovers a warhead from the wreck.
A good thing, too, because he is the only menace around -- not
nearly enough to sustain this endless tale. As it turns out, there
is nothing else in the deep except some benign escapees from Steven
Spielberg country. Harris and Mastrantonio do have a strong death
and resurrection sequence, but long before that, one is pining for
a rubber shark or a plastic octopus -- anything, in fact, out of
a good old low-tech thriller.