If You Want A Proper Article James, Release the Movie on Blu-Ray (The Abyss)

Commissioned By Patrick DeVita-Dillon. By his request, this is the Special Edition.

How does on kiss the ocean without a face?

The Abyss is perhaps the moment in James Cameron’s career where he went from “I think the military is a problematic fav due to its role as a monstrous machine that grinds good people into dust” (notably, much like comics writer Garth Ennis, Cameron views the concept of war as bad, but the soldiers who fight in it as good. This becomes quite problematic considering the long, awful history of soldiers doing awful things to the native populations they invade that Cameron’s filmography has a tendency of ignoring in favor of recontextualizing the Aliens from Alien as being a metaphor for the Viet Cong: inhuman, unfeeling, relentless, and bringer of PTSD to soldiers who were too gung-ho to notice the meatgrinder before them) to “I want to fuck the ocean.” There are certainly works postdating The Abyss where James Cameron tries to make his love of the military work (most notably, the misogynistic right wing spy thriller, True Lies [Note: while James Cameron is very much a leftie, it is nonetheless possible for a director such as him to overlook issues within his text that lean more right wing. There are certainly elements of many a director’s filmography that don’t match up with what they believe]), but those films lack the crackle of his more “I want to fuck the ocean” films, much in the same way the spark between a romantic couple isn’t there once the relationship has gone sour. (As an aside, The Abyss was produced by Gale Anne Hurd and released the same year they divorced. She would be the second of five wives.)

Perhaps the main issue with talking about The Abyss is that it’s a very visual film. As such, writing about the Special Edition means I have to watch the film in the worst possible format: Widescreen shrunk down to fit into a Full Screen format on a Widescreen TV. As such, I can’t properly write about the movie due to its lack of visual clarity, which has always been the best part of James Cameron’s films. Even when the plots boil down to “So I’m really mad about my divorce and I’m taking it out on Jamie Lee Curtis. Also, Crimson Jihad,” they find a way to look wonderful. Sadly, due to the way the DVD release of The Abyss was formatted, I can’t properly write an article on the film until the film is released on Blu-Ray or there is a screening of the Special Edition where the visuals can be seen in their full beauty. Sorry Pat.

Also, fuck you James for using that Nietzsche quote at the beginning. That was lame, thematically irrelevant, and everyone knows it.