MEM has breasts? Who knew?
Great movie. Flawed, as noted above, but great. The aired-on-TV version usually omits the sinking of the Trident sub USS Montana at the beginning, which is madness - that’s a kickass scene!
Some favorite bits:
- the rat breathing in the deep-diving fluid
- the water tentacle exploring DeepCore and being cut off
- DeepCore is almost dragged off the edge
- “Oh, hi, Lindsey!” the black woman says enthusiastically over the radio when MEM arrives, then silently points into her mouth as if gagging
- Bud negotiates a generous hazardous-pay package for his crew when the Navy wants to come a-callin’
- The nerd uses the ROV to show the SEALs’ hidden nuclear warhead and says, “Heeeere’s MIRV!”
- Bud discards his wedding ring in the chemical toilet, then resignedly recovers it, staining his hand
- The aliens’ curtain of water moves vertically past Bud so that he can breathe
I’m gonna have to see it again now…
After this movie, and Navy Seals and The Rock, I was kind of offended that G.I. Jane was about Navy Seals and didn’t have Micheal Biehn in it.
And there is much more visible in the fullscreen version - probably not available on DVD - I have it on Laserdisc.
The next time you watch it, notice that in all the underwater scenes, there is NO sea-life to be seen. Not a single fish. All that stuff was filmed in a giant tank, not in the ocean.
Yes – I believe it was what was left of an uncompleted nuclear power plant.
But why would the absence of sea life bother you? They were supposed to be pretty far down, with negligibble light. Things don’t like to live where there’s no energy input, so life is pretty sparse down there as it is. Not surprising that there aren’t any fish.
Yeah, I remember reading at the time about all the tech they invented for this film.
They created this tank in a incomplete power plant’s cooling tower as a underwater ‘soundstage’ that was the first of its kind, and is available for future movies (though CGI is popular now to avoid the difficulties inherent in actual water).
The diving helmets were created for the movie, to solve the constant problem of real helmets not showing the actor’s face. However, they were made by a company that provides diving equipment to industry, and they sell a lot of that model to people outside the movie business.
I think one, and maybe both, of the ROVs used in the film was designed for the movie, but have been available for lease since, and they have been used extensively for research and industry.
Once you are more than a couple hundred feet down the amount of visible marine life drops dramatically, even in clear water where light does penetrate. There is still life down there, but it isn’t generally as thick, mobile, or colorful as life near the surface. (When I taught scuba diving, I would remind students that not only are your longest and most safe dives in relatively shallow water (less than sixty feet) but you also end up seeing the most wildlife, if that is your objective.
Stranger
I was watching that last night on the SciFi channel. I still like the movie, even with some of the silly things going on.
I’ve got to bitch, though. That Ogdamn channel shows almost exactly as much commercial time as movie time. I HATE that channel and have vowed never to watch it ever again. The runtime for the movie was 140 mins. Guess how long the time slot was?
11PM - 3 AM.
FOUR HOURS. That is just some world class bullshit right there.
And thank you to Elendil’s Heir for clearing up the blue hand thing! I came in a little late to the show, and after the rescuisitation scene, Bud’s hand is clearly shown and I couldn’t remember or figure out what in the hell that was all about. I thought, well, maybe good 'ol Ed has a discolored hand from some freak accident or birthmark or something. 
I recently bought titanium wedding bands and on the website, the model known as “Abyss Replica” is one of their top sellers.
The movie brought us Photoshop, pretty neato.
The movie glossed over this pretty badly, where the OSC book made it clearer. Bud stuck his hand into the chemical toilet to retrieve his wedding ring, knowing it would semi-permanently stain his hand blue, which would explain his cursing as he reached in (although reaching into a chemical toilet in the first place is pretty curse-worthy). His hand was prominently blue afterwards, in as many scenes as I could track it, and the blue hand remained unexplained in movie-time, so it might have seemed fairly random in to a movie goer. The ring saves his (or was it Cat’s?) life later in the movie, when the rig starts flooding and the flood doors start closing.
Now, we all saw him stick it into the blue toilet water and come out blue! Unless you were out for a “pee and a popcorn” but it was fairly early in the picture for that… 
When we saw it in the theater, my friends and laughed out loud and said something “Oh yeah, that’s gonna stain…”
And the ring saved him from a closing watertight door, IIRC. Strong frikkin’ ring, that.
I know. But they were supposed to be more than a few hundred feet deep, so I expect the life to be quite sparse.
Yeah, but it was pretty easy to miss the connection to the blue hand 90 minutes later. At least it was for me – there was a lot else going on at the start of the movie.
OK, one other thing that bothered me about the alien subplot. It was so damn human-centric. IOW, the aliens were fully prepared to unleash devastation on a scale that would have made a nuclear war look like a fender bender in the grocery store parking lot. I mean seriously. 1000-foot waves?! Human loss on a scale a nuke war could not match, PLUS thousands upon thousands of extinctions, destroyed habitats, etc. Christ, ya glowy bastards, switch to decaf, huh? Overreact much?
I have a ReplayTV. What are these “commercial” things of which you speak? They do not exist in my world.
It’s the only thing that makes Doctor Who on American TV bearable.
I always figured the producers insisted on it as the only way they could figure to show her tits – during the resuscitation scene.
Whenever i feel like i’ve had a horrible day i might watch The Abyss. Talk about a situation going from bad to worse to worst and after 3 hours, i feel much better!
Er, what?
The best I could find via Google was that the water tentacle effect was done via Photoshop, before it was released, but Photoshop is actually pretty terrible for video effects. I thought I remembered that they used a pre-release Video Toaster.