James Cameron's 'The Abyss' is stunning

I'd been waiting (in vain, apparently) for The Abyss to come out on Blu-ray so that I could watch it for the first time in the highest possible quality, but then I decided, what the heck, it's taking way too long.Watching it was a revelation in the purest sense of the word: it felt like a major discovery. It's not like when you finally watch a small arthouse film or a forgotten little gem that were never meant to be widely seen in the first place - no, this is an A-level superproduction, filled with awesome stuff and bravura filmmaking that are as impressive as anything you can see in contemporary blockbusters. Or maybe even more impressive, as it was actually shot in a huge underwater tank instead of everything being CGI.I had read that the movie underwhelmed at the box-office in 1989. It's rarely mentioned with the same reverence as Terminator, Aliens, or Titanic in discussions about James Cameron's legacy. Sure, it might be a little long in the tooth, James Horner would've been a much better fit than Alan Silvestri to compose the score, one could even cynically describe it as an overplotted underwater riff on Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But it works so well. The characters and the actors who play them are likable (and Michael Biehn is efficiently hateful as the villain), the cinematography makes it all haunting and wondrous, the sets so huge and intricate it beggars belief, and most of the visual effects are still so stunning it's hard to believe they haven't been recently upgraded. I lost count of how many times I asked myself, how in the world did they do that in the late '80s? James Cameron is an absolute madman!Sure, it'd have been easy to make a sort of scary underwater Alien (and even so it'd have been infinitely better than the likes of Sphere or Underwater), but the hopeful, amicable nature of the encounter with the alien creatures avoided the cheesiness of, say, Mission to Mars. Even the anti-nuclear, anti-Cold War stance doesn't feel contrived.Sorry if this all sounds lame. I'm late to the party, and surely most of you have seen this film several times. Just had to get this off my chest, and ask if anyone else feels the same, or felt the same when they had their first close encounter with The Abyss. via /r/movies https://ift.tt/38oreuC