MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Abyss’: A Watered-Down Close Encounter

“The Abyss” (throughout San Diego County) is the most hardware-cluttered movie imaginable, full of dials and valves and pressure locks and daunting technical gear, yet it leaves you feeling sappily euphoric. This must be like rapture of the deep: Machines crash against other machines underwater with a slo-mo bounce and a bell-like clanggggg; the ocean begins to collect as many floating spare parts as space and we look at it all benignly, “Thasssss nice.” All stress washes away in this intense, mindless blueness; it’s like 2 hours and 20 minutes in an immersion tank full of Scope.

With all its numskullness, “The Abyss” is at heart a sweet movie, full of people dying and then living for love, and nothing new to add on the subject of other-worldlings than “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” offered 12 years ago: “Give ‘em a chance. You don’t hurt them; they don’t hurt you. Who knows, we might learn something from them.”

But the climax of “Close Encounters” was breathtaking and the climax of “The Abyss” is downright embarrassing; in the light of day, its payoff effect looks like a glazed ceramic what’s-it your 11-year-old made in crafts class. It’s criminal, because the undersea effects are glowingly beautiful and one gimmick used by the “non-terrestrial intelligence” (jargon theirs) is jaw-dropping. Perhaps, to keep us in its spell, this final effect should have surfaced at night.

It’s not at all hard to believe that writer-director James Cameron has carried this film in his head since he was 17; it’s a 17-year-old’s vision, complete with men who say “Steady, big fella” to each other without a trace of irony. In the meantime, however, Cameron and his producer and former co-writer, Gale Anne Hurd, have learned to make movies like “The Terminator” and “Aliens” that move with a headlong, punishing pace. So here we are, taking turns between free-floating and being propelled forward with a whoosh. And all in the service of a truly footling script.

In brief, Cameron strands a nuclear submarine, armed with a bomb-to-end-all-bombs, on a shelf in the Caribbean. Two teams are involved in a rescue against the clock to get the dee-vice: the (mostly) hairy, brawny, wisecracking crew of Deepcore, a “submersible hyperbaric drilling platform” lodged at sea bottom--the gang we may think of as us . And there are the militaristic crew-cut Navy SEAL (Sea, Air and Land) commandos, who are definitely them . Threatening them all is a malady called High-Pressure Nervous Syndrome, a sort of underwater PMS, which causes irrationality and galloping Oliver Northism. There’s also a hurricane battering the Navy forces topside. And that bomb.

Now you add the personalities. Returning to Deepcore during this crisis is Lindsey Brigman (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), who seems to revel in her widespread reputation as “a cast-iron bitch.” She has designed every inch of the steel monster and goes through it turning wheels and tapping valves like someone tidying up her kitchen after others have been messing in it.

Foreman of Deepcore is Bud Brigman (Ed Harris), her estranged husband, seemingly thrilled about the split. Head of the loyal SEAL opposition is Lt. Coffey (Michael Biehn), whose eyes begin rolling like marbles within minutes of arriving at Deepcore’s niche on the ocean floor. Before long, he is carving hash marks on his forearm with his assault knife. Not hard to tell where the dreaded nervous syndrome has struck this time.

Most prominent of the crew members are Catfish (Leo Burmester), Harris’ huge, ginger-bearded decompression expert, company for his scarier swims; the paranoid Hippy (Todd Graff), who has a pet white rat, and a roughneck, no-nonsense underwater tractor pilot, One Night (Kimberly Scott). If your heart sinks at names like this, it has every reason to. Not a single surprise of dialogue or character awaits you.

As these men and women take to the depths in crab-like pods with pincer claws, or in extended-time diving helmets, or immersed in a liquid that lets Ed Harris “breathe fluid instead of air,” we await the appearance of The Other. Imagine the surprise of discovering that it’s a neon flittering Tinker Bell that leaves mortals all the better for encounters with its presence.

There are more: rounded glowing transparent creatures in sea shapes. Most mysterious of all these visions is something like a mercury-glass pseudopod, a probe with a worm-like shape that can assume any shape and moves with the liquidity of water. This is the movie’s payload, and in this blue, watery womb-like state it’s tempting to float free and just enjoy it and the picture’s frail message about the power of love. If only Cameron knew what to do with his other-worldlings; an explanation of their world, even a use for them except as a nifty, power-assisted forklift. So his picture simply dribbles away.

In the matter of hardware (and excepting its final effect) “The Abyss” is flawless in each technical department; unfortunately, they can’t all be credited here. Cinematographer Mikael Salomon’s camera seems to race down steel corridors, only milliseconds in front of walls of water, and it seems to have been his formidable job to light up this Stygian universe. The business of non-gurgling voices at every depth would seem to be a horrendous task, conquered by sound mixer Lee Orloff. The veteran Leslie Dilley’s production designs are both realistic and properly otherworldly.

But apart from its technical gee-whizzery, “The Abyss” has more than its share of eyebrow-raisers. As Harris looks unconvinced about taking liquid fluorocarbon into his lungs in place of air, a wiser source says soothingly, “We all breathe liquid for nine months, Bud. Your body will remember.” That may be news to many of us ex-babies.

Forget “Quest for Fire,” where the half-naked cast huddled under pelts that must have smelled like wet Airedales. “The Abyss’s” permanently drenched crew wins the Most Pathetic vote in a dog-paddle, including the estimable Mastrantonio, who must willingly drown herself in another plot-line mind-boggler. She and the ice-blue-eyed Harris do manage to bring fire to all this damp tinder, but it can’t have been easy.

It’s perfectly possible to have a mindlessly pleasant time in the intense Tidy-Bowl blueness of “The Abyss.” You just relax and let go. You may just wonder when you come out if you haven’t pruned a little.