Summer of '89: Tons of Underwater Horror

These guys are about as much fun as a tax audit.

The Abyss (1989)

A civilian oil rig crew is recruited to conduct a search and rescue effort when a nuclear submarine mysteriously sinks. One diver soon finds himself on a spectacular odyssey 25,000 feet below the ocean’s surface where he confronts a mysterious force that has the power to change the world or destroy it.

August 9, 1989

Ed Harris, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Michael Biehn, Leo Burmester, Todd Graff
cinematography by Mikael Salomon
music by Alan Silvestri
screenplay by James Cameron
produced by Gale Anne Hurd
directed by James Cameron

Jim Cameron has been interested in the ocean since he was a boy. Although he grew up in Ontario, a few hundred miles from the nearest ocean, he would watch Jacques Cousteau television specials and study National Geographics, learning as much as he could about that world we still know so little about.

Nothing has changed as the decades have passed. In 1997, Cameron directed Titanic, the epic romance blockbuster that was basically just his excuse to explore the wreckage, (he has admitted to as much and has also visited it a whopping 33 times in total.) Before he made his next highest-grossing movie of all time, Avatar, he directed a pair of underwater documentaries, Ghosts of the Abyss and Aliens of the Deep. And finally, his most recent (and so far only) Avatar sequel is subtitled The Way of Water and includes the most impressive underwater sequences I've ever seen.

1989's The Abyss was the trial run for all of the ideas, themes, relationships, and cool-ass underwater shit that would follow in the next three-plus decades of his career. It was the fourth film of Cameron's young career (it counts as his third if you, like Cameron, don't count Piranha II: The Spawning - I do) and the first that would earn him his...uh...reputation.

''I want total control,'' he told the New York Times in a piece published three days before the film's wide release. Submerging his actors, namely Ed Harris, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and Michael Biehn, some thirty-ish feet underwater for months on end (the underwater sequences total about 40% of the movie's 140-minute runtime), Cameron came in over schedule and over budget, which would become an ongoing issue in his career. Harris called the process "a bitch," actor Leo Burmester said it was "the hardest thing I've ever done," and Mastrantonio once reportedly stormed off set yelling, "We are not animals!"

Cameron didn't care. His "limited sympathy" for the actors (his words) is probably best summed up in a quote from the same Times piece, "For every hour they spent trying to figure out what magazine to read, we spent an hour at the bottom of the tank breathing compressed air."

The film took 140 days to shoot and came in $4 million over budget...and that's just principal photography. It was originally supposed to come out July 4th (which would have been the perfect time for such a movie) but needed an extra month's work on the special effects.

Worth it? You decide. The film opened to $9.3 million its opening weekend, finishing second behind...Parenthood. It went on to total $90 million in box office receipts, which is just about double the budget, (doubling a reported budget is usually the true cost of a film after marketing, overhead, etc.) Reviews at the time were overall positive but rarely full of praise. Gene Siskel, for example, complimented the underwater sequences (which are undeniably fantastic) but felt underwhelmed by story elements, (he liked it more upon the 1993 Special Edition). A 2023 rerelease which premiered the 4K restoration released on home media a few months later, was called "controversial for some or a celebration for others" by Matthew Hartman of High-Def Digest, for its "AI shenanigans and revised color timing."

(Personally? It's not my favorite Cameron, but Cameron isn't my favorite. The Terminator is one of my favorite movies ever and I think Titanic is a masterpiece, but I've found myself appreciating his work more often than I actually like it. He really throws the kitchen sink here, but I think he does everything better in better movies. For me, The Abyss ranks near the bottom of his movies.)

And even with all those movie stars and a huge budget and truly groundbreaking effects, it still didn't stand unopposed at the box office. 1989 saw not one, not two, but three other underwater horror films...