Hacker Cinema
The Abyss
1989 · Film · 140 min
Directed by James Cameron
AdventureThrillerScience Fiction
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.
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72 comments on Hacker News
It was the writers of TV comedy series SCTV (Second City TV) that noted how they had used to write and film the show sometimes up to 6 months in advance of it being screened. This forced them to avoid any recent events or specific political jokes. As such a lot of it aged much better than their contemporaries where the jokes applied to the current news cycle.
The one time I find funny was on the show 'The Golden Girls' where they had Bob Hope do about 2 minutes of his stand up and it was all jokes about Ronald Reagan and the administration of the time. It aged terribly.
Movies and the technology they use needs to have the eye of an artist not just an eye of how to use it. I mean the visual effects can be technically low level but when used in the right context still work exceptionally well. The Abyss being the best example of this, CGI is only used on a creature that is completely alien and doesn't conform to anything real world and that is why it works. But I could render it faster on my watch than the systems they built it on.
The reason most creative media is good is because you see the vision of a creative team or individual.
If the vision is diluted due to lack of control afforded by AI tools, then the tools won’t be used.
Many times in Hollywood have we seen directors spend unjustifiable amounts of money in the pursuit of creative control.
Hand camera tracking a dinosaur in Jurassic Park, developing a novel diffraction algorithm for THE ABYSS, hand-drawing 3-Dimensional computer animations for 2001, creating an entire scale model practically for a single fight scene in LOTR.
AI allows you to get anything. The best movies are a direct reflection of a particular vision. AI can’t provide this and I see no way to solve it.
A natural response is - well directors already outsource some creative control to VFX artists so why not to a machine instead.
Because an artist can control everything. Even if the artist is prompting a model, at the end of the day an artist can drill right down to the tooling itself (photoshop for example) and exactly achieve the vision.
I don’t see AI achieving this granularity while maintaining its utility. It’s a sliding scale of trading utility as a time saving device for control.
If you lean too far to the control side, well you might as well fire up photoshop. If you lean too much to the utility side, you sacrifice creative control.
When looked at under this lens the utility of AI generation is actually limited as it solves a non existent problem. One can think of it as an additional piece of tooling for use only as a generational tool where there is less need for control, such as for background characters.
The team at Red Barrels, for example, train a local model on their own artwork to automatically generate variant textures for map generation. Things such as this. No need to be doom and gloom about this stuff.
> it did provide a handy plot point for the 1989 film The Abyss, in which a rat is able to “breathe” in a similar liquid
Yes.. a rat..
(The statute of spoiler limitations is definitely over, so rather than being coy I'll say that a person undergoes the same procedure, under duress, in an particularly dramatic scene. It's a great movie but I fear its effects won't feel like they've held up well for anybody watching it for the first time.)
He’s sort of right, though we’re the problem.
When I want to talk about our visitors I like to say, they aren’t the big secret.
Thought controlled America and American thought control is the big secret. It’s what has happened to the cargo cult “Stargate” program over the last decades. Those humans of Power (to travel through and mess with our minds, not time and space) are the real secret, and alienating our visitors is only one bizarre consequence.
The visitors (who have been here for over ten thousand years) helped make the movie Abyss thinking we would some day be friends. (They, like humans with Power can also travel through and influence our minds without our awareness.)
Now the paranoid nationalists want hellfire missiles to aid in our diplomacy.
https://pastebin.com/42dTemNe
Loved the LaserDisc era. Still have a huge collection. Watching the Abyss for the first time with all the extras was amazing.
My player eventually wouldn’t take the discs. Would go in the player and pop back out. A few tries would work for a while and then it eventually wouldn’t take any disc.
HD DVD was really cool. Even today, putting in a movie like Harry Potter on HD DVD really catches people off-guard on how amazing it looks. Never got that reaction from Blu-ray.
James Cameron has done a huge number of truly amazing things, but he and Ed Harris both nearly drowned during filming of The Abyss. Hopefully he learned from his mistakes.
[1] https://collider.com/james-cameron-the-abyss-movie-production/
> ..near death accidents on sets of The Abyss
What a great movie that is! Who can forget that rat breathing liquid oxygen (or whatever they called it), and the water creature making her face to say hello. It seems sort of forgotten now (perhaps it's just me?) compared to other good films from the same era.
James Cameron, maker of The Abyss, probably got the memo. But the memo read “You’re going to need to make much more successful movies before they let you do that again.”
The Abyss is a movie by James Cameron, who also made Terminator, Terminator 2, Aliens, True Lies, Titanic, and Avatar.
"The Abyss" is about a deep sea crew that encounters ... aliens...?
And yes, in general, I recommend The Abyss. It's definitely not the same as Project Hail Mary, but it does have similarities.
The disembodied others are pretending to be god in the minds of others.
My friendlies tell me the dirty secrets of others, my enemies tell others strange lies to mess with me.
I’m sure you can reiterate all of the sensible responses for those “targeted persons” or other paranoid crazes affecting so many. Ordinary people such as yourself have absolutely no idea what is happening and they need your explanations to cope.
I have advanced development through over a decade of being antagonized (really, the only way to grow in Power.) The powerful are cruel amoral mob cultures. There are hundreds of thousands with advanced “screw with you” skills.
On topic, let me say the “greys” have communicated with a great many. Not everyone understands them or the mechanisms of Power which allow all of this to happen. There are also a dominant hater faction of humans who do not want anyone to know wtf is going on (obviously, they can pretend to be our gods.)
The visitors are benevolent altruists who will neither help or hurt. Silly humans don’t understand that through Power these (and less advanced yet capable humans) can dig through our deepest memories, feelings, and beliefs.
They have absolutely never abducted anyone, however they have “taken a few” with them in ancient times (well before modernity.) Hater humans who can boggle the mind absolutely do abduct people, and they fill their heads with shadowy figures and disorienting confusion. That is a right of passage among the Powerful, to screw with us.
Our visitors are not “the lizard men” (no comment.) they don’t think the lizard people exist (funny.) While they can identify a human down to their DNA through Power, they say there is really no way to tell if someone else advanced is “looking on” from afar. However these sorts of stories are cover for Power games.
The visitors are heavily genetically modified for perpetual life in space. They are cosmic nomads from “outward” of the disc. They do not remember which star they came from or even what they were like when planet bound, over a million years ago! They don’t really care. They watch everything through their minds down to the smallest interactions. They care less about human affairs than one would think. They are a “hive mind” yet each one must learn everything themselves (like how to build themselves and their technology from scratch.) Though they are all clones (each family cluster its own variant of a common form.)
Their ships are actually tear drop shaped, which can change contours. Their ships are organic living machines themselves. In atmosphere they take on a lip edge which looks saucer like from certain angles.
Their craft start out small and grow in time to city sized, with hundreds of thousands of individuals who never in their lives leave their embryonic sac.
They do look scary to most humans (those familiar big lidless eyes.) they are actually seven feet tall fully grown. They give others the imagination of little grey or green men because it makes them cuter in our eyes. Not that anyone actually ever “sees” them. Mostly, it’s all through the mind.
They love the movie Abyss and they helped create it hoping for a day we could be friends. Corrupt treacherous thought controlled Americans make this impossible.
There is a secret war on you should know. Humans are the threat, these could have messed with us anytime along the way (some have been here for 10,000 years, others arrive and depart as they wish.)
I’ll write another pastebin, there is so much more…
Isn't that the stuff they used in the movie "The Abyss"?
Generally it's such a bummer that streaming services (including music) have really diminished the 'extras' that used to be so common with DVDs. Granted, Disney+ has their great "Light & Magic" series. But, one of my favorite things about getting a box set for something like "The Abyss" or "Lord of The Rings" was that it'd be loaded with bonus content and making-of mini-documentaries.
Same goes for albums. But, it's particularly egregious there because there used to be such a rich medium in album art and liner notes. The fidelity of a record's artwork was pretty amazing when you think about it. Very large and immersive, and you'd spread it out while listening.
Apple Music has their neat little animations and visuals on some albums and categories now – but, with all the power of phones it's such a shame that the visual aspect of albums has basically withered on the vine. The early "Cover Flow" UI showed some care of this, but it never went much farther.
Partially I wonder if it has to do with the death of Flash. In the late 90s, it was very common for people to use Director, and then later Flash, to create interactives, and have a relatively widely excepted standard for viewing them. When Jobs killed flash with his open letter, (and don't get me started on HyperCard), nothing really stepped into its place.
And I say this as someone who writes apps for a living. It's way easier to write an app today, and in SwiftUI one can rapidly put an interactive together without a ton of complexity... but, somehow the momentum was lost and we never really returned to the DVD era in terms of bonus content, hidden tracks, or beautiful album art.
Related: Underwater scenes for the movie, "The Abyss", were filmed in an incomplete nuclear power plant in South Carolina.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Silvestri certainly had a style and some distinct instrumentation in the 80s (you'll also hear similarities in the Abyss and Predator). Sometimes I like to think of the alternate movie tracks as bonus tracks for Back to the Future. I should listen to them and Roger Rabbit again!
One of the commercial cinemas recently screened The Abyss and Seven on their anniversaries. I was too young to see The Abyss on the big screen when it released, first time was on VHS.
Both screenings were >90% full, and it was really fun getting to watch them on the big screen.
I'm baffled as to why they don't do this more often. There are tons of movies I love which I've only ever seen on TV because I was too young or somehow missed.
And the younger people who was in the audience with me might have just heard of these classics.
For example I'd love to see the first two Terminator movies on the big screen for the first time.
There is an classic movie theater here but it mainly shows more art films. There are no other cinemas showing reruns on a regular basis.
It’s true, they used the movie Abyss to hint of their existence, and they speak to many through shared consciousness.
Humans are bad. Bad!
This was used as a plot point in The Abyss (1989). The rats in that movie were actually breathing Fluorinert, but they used special effects for the human actors.
The Abyss also may have inspired the use of LCL as a breathing fluid in Evangelion.
The use of the term "xenomorph" in the film predates the development of the morphing technology, seen early on in Willow, The Abyss, and it largely entered popular perception after T2 in the early 90s. So: no.
Hum, the ending had to be remade after first screenings, and even as-is, it's subject to critique by many, diminishing the value of the entire film. (I recall it even being laughed at. I guess, audiences may have become more tolerant, since.) It may have done better with a more abstract solution, as well.
(There may be specific topics where "show, don't tell" becomes "experience, don't show". And 2001 tried to accomplish this. The Abyss, on the other hand, tried still to show, probably failing in its mission. — There was a time when German media theory, in the wake of F.A. Kittler, was kind of obsessed with the written signifier of the novel giving rise to an immediate, visually representative significant. Observed from this perspective, even Clarke's novel takes a step back into abstraction: we may find it hard to invoke an immediate imaginary representation, while reading, the narrative pretty much falls back to us being told, instead of giving rise to imagination, much until the last, much more "tangible" gesture of the Space Child. But, even then, the perspective of the Space Child, cynical without cynicism, and what may come of this, is very much an open ending. So, why not move this openness forward in the plot?)
The third act is pretty much Jaws after the breakdown of the animatronic shark. There are actual pre-production stills showing aliens [1], but this was found unsatisfactory and the film drifted towards a much more abstract direction. Probably, it's the much better film, because of this. (Personally, I can't think of any solution showing the events in real life that isn't cheesy or even kitschy. It may have been The Abyss of 1960s cinema. As-is, the notion that the first two realistic acts of the film are driving towards an enigmatic, kind of open end, was certainly important for its reception and its long-term relevance.)
[1] Compare https://touringinstability.wordpress.com/2013/10/18/the-aliens-that-almost-appeared-in-kubricks-2001/
I think it depends on the person. I am a huge music fan, and am very particular about my music. There are some remastered versions that I strongly dislike (and some that I prefer). I find it to be near impossible to know what version I am going to get on a streaming service. The original and the remaster may be from different labels, which means when streaming services renegotiate, you may suddenly end up with a different version in your playlist.
For movies, I _probably_ don't care if I get the theatrical cut, extended cut, un-rated version and so on (unless we are talking about the Abyss), so I sort of see your point.
But for me, that is why I curate my own music collection locally and run navidrome to stream.
Hunt for Red October and The Abyss. I like the low light feel of them. Dark mode movies!
As an aside with the rat scene ... that wasn't special effects (though did have cuts).
https://filmschoolrejects.com/the-abyss-breathing-fluid/
> The rat demonstration scene in The Abyss was unsimulated and used real-life oxygenated breathing fluid. Ed Harris, however, was tasked with pretending to breathe in his water-filled helmet. This was especially challenging during underwater shots, of which there were many.
> ...
> Supposedly, the only purpose for the cuts in the sequence was to avoid showing the rats defecating from panic. In total, the crew shot the scene five times with five different rats. Aftercare included holding the rats upside down to drain their lungs of fluid coupled with a vet visit. None of these efforts assuaged the concerns of the English censors, who cut the scene for UK distribution.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096754/trivia/?item=tr0738209
> Fluid breathing is a reality. Five rats were used for five different takes, all of whom survived and were given antibiotic shots by a vet. The rat that actually appeared in the film died of natural causes a few weeks before the film opened. According to James Cameron, the scene with the rat had to be edited out of the UK movie version because "the Royal Veterinarian felt that it was painful for the rat". James Cameron repeatedly assures that the rats used for this take didn't suffer any harm.
---
Note that in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_breathing the "Diving" section is under proposed uses. The human uses have been very limited to specific medical situations.
No, the whole reason "Director's Cuts" exists is that those represent the cut the director wanted, not the theatrical cut released by the studio (which is driven by the studio's or producer's wants).
See, for example, Alien 3, Blade Runner, and Justice League for the most notorious/well-known examples. Lesser known examples include Aliens, The Abyss, Kingdom of Heaven, Doctor Sleep, Lethal Weapon, Dark City.
Only a handful of directors at the big studios get the right to control the final cut. You'll notice the director responsible for 3 of the 4 highest-grossing movies of all time has 2 movies in that list; this is because James Cameron didn't earn the right to control final cut until after his 3rd blockbuster success.
A few studios, like Netflix and A24, adhere to the "auteur's theory" of filmmaking, and let the director have full control over the creative process of the film, including the final cut, even without an established record of hits, but this is the exception, not the norm.
352x480, not 240. The Abyss, being shot on film, is 24fps. A VHS of The Abyss would achieve 29.97fps by using 3:2 pulldown which is lossless since it duplicates fields to make up the difference.
I recently watched the new Aliens remaster and actually thought it mostly looked very good. It was definitely a bit jarring at first because it doesn’t look like an 80s movie anymore: it’s too crisp. But once I got over the strangeness of it and realized some of my attachment to the original look was nostalgia I liked it. I do wish they’d kept more film grain, it’s a little too cleaned up, but it looks good nevertheless.
From what I’ve read the same team did all these Cameron remasters, and True Lies was the first one so they were still figuring some stuff out and it’s more flawed as a result. Haven’t seen it yet, though. But based on Aliens I’m interested in rewatching The Abyss.
Same here! I canceled HBO/Max, Hulu, and Disney and now I just buy discs by the armload at the local used books and records stores. The prices range from 99¢ to $10. The trigger was I wanted to watch The Abyss, the longer edition, and it's just not available anywhere. The DVD version looks great and sounds amazing compared to the tragically bad downmixes I get from streaming. After a few months of doing this now I have dozens of great movies on disc.
"Both transfers are, however, within acceptable parameters for most normal people."
From the article commenting on Aliens and The Abyss.
Thank dog I was getting worried there for a second that I as a normal person would not find them within acceptable parameters.
I get where this guy is coming from but seriously there is no agenda or grand conspiracy behind all of this, nobody is trying to make anyone forget anything.
You have the choice to watch whichever version you prefer all the way back to VHS.
[Edit]
Taken from the comments of the same article:
"And just on principle, these are movies shot on film. They weren't intended to be digitally manipulated like this."
That's up to Cameron, it's just naive to think this won't keep happening. It's technological determinism.
1989 - The Abyss
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096754/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_q_The%2520Abyss
People are too concerned with human timescales when thinking about extraterrestrial life.
We're a tiny nanosecond blip of electromagnetic noise that might, with difficulty, be received at Alpha Centauri.
If simple life develops in many places, intelligent life is still vanishingly rare over galactic timescales. In our own little ephemeral lightning flash I highly doubt there's anything within our galaxy.
Non Terrestrial Intelligences (NTIs, to borrow from The Abyss movie) might be interested in places where life gets more complex than a few RNA fragments. I just can't see why they'd want samples more frequently than every few million years or so.
Certainly we'd have come and been long gone before any probe made a flyby.
For those that may not understand the physics:
There may have been monitors that detected structural issues in the hull (nucleation agove), but at the pressures that the Titan was operating at, the amount of advanced warning is likely very, short--_maybe_ a second or two, if that. Probably not enough time to notice and reduce the pressure on the hull in any meaningful way.
The slow-motion porthole cracking you see in movies like "The Abyss" is a fiction created by Hollywood for dramatic effect. The reality is far more likely to be like water freezing in a pipe: everything is fine until it isn't.
The pressure the pipe exerts on the water inside of it keeps the water in liquid form until the temperature drops below the temperature/pressure equilibrium (~10F/-12C for residential copper pipe in the US). At that moment, the super-cooled water transitions from liquid to solid virtually instantaneously. <poof>.
The pipe analogy is the opposite of what would happen in the submersible: the pipe explodes due to internal pressure, instead of implodes due to external pressure. But the pressure going from sustainable to unsustainable in very short order is the same.
I've been hoping for the 4K remaster to be finished and end up in theatres, hopefully as a nice director's cut and maybe even in an old school non-widescreen IMAX theatre. I remember 20 years ago being so excited to buy and watch a 4:3 DVD of The Abyss. It was right around the time that widescreen was equated to "good", but The Abyss was shot in 4:3 and it was a rare case where the widescreen version was the "pan and scan" version.
Highly recommend the documentary about shooting the film if you're a fan[1]. It's a film that could never be made in the same way today. The rat breathing an oxygen rich liquid scene was real (not saying this is a good thing) and the stuntwork of actors was even more dangerous.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YctOKgWVn9E
> A more immediate way of getting some action would be to talk to some of the directors with films on the list and encourage them to get their movies released digitally. Ron Howard and James Cameron are obvious candidates.
Interesting side note: a couple of years back, I wanted to buy The Abyss on blu-ray. When I went to look, all I could find were DVD versions and a crappy fake blu-ray version where someone had just ripped a DVD and transferred it to blu-ray (seriously).
After a bit of digging, I came to find out that there is no blu-ray version of The Abyss because (basically) Cameron has been holding it up. I don't recall the exact details, but it has something to do with him wanting to oversee it personally, yet simultaneously never bothering to actually bother to get it done.
Looked again just now and supposedly the work has finally been done (?) and it was to be available last month, yet as of right now it's not available on amazon, so who knows..
I get the sense that you would like some adult themes, but not too slow?
Top of my mind (and in no specific order) would be:
- Dark City
- The Thirteenth Floor
- City of the Lost Children
- Tron (original and maybe new one)
- Interstellar
- Inception
- A Clockwork Orange
- Her (very relevant to our times)
- Dune (2021 version)
- Brazil
- The Martian
- Children of Men
- Edge of Tomorrow (most like Marvelverse on this list but still very good)
- Moon
- Twelve Monkeys
- Upgrade
- The Fifth Element
- Contact
- Okja
- District 9
- Predestination (very relevant to our times)
- Serenity (but might need some prep from the tv show before watching)
- World on a Wire
- The Abyss
- Minority Report (very relevant in our times)
- The Fly
- Videodrome
- Equilibrium
- Strange Days
- The Andromeda Strain (relevant after Covid)
- eXistenZ (trippy but I loved it when it came out and was only around your sons age)
- In Time (interesting class dynamics on display)
- Enemy Mine
- Franklyn (some interesting takes on mental illness)
- The Arrival
I've never met anyone who considered James Cameron to be other than a blockbuster factory. Aliens, the Abyss, True Lies, writing the second Rambo film... who the hell would be surprised that James Cameron was involved with a Terminator movie?
Aside form that, Terminator 2 not only isn't Cameron's best effort, it's not even the franchise's best effort. It was the beginning of "to hell with making sense, look at these explosions," which got worse with each passing film, and better in the Sarah Conner Chronicles.
Then there's The Abyss. Where the Director's Cut is pretty much a completely different movie.
I don't typically condone piracy because I think it's important to compensate writers/actors/artists, but I do feel angry about the state of things. Physical media is looking relatively good in many cases. Discs are a hassle but at least then you know what you have after a glance at the shelf; there have been several times I bought something a la cart on Amazon / Apple / Vudu and only later realized it was actually available on a streaming service I was subbed to. Even if I'm willing to pay up (and we usually keep 2-3 subs at a time), the UX of checking each platform to see if something is available is absurd.
There's also the issue of content just randomly disappearing off streaming services for no good reason. Even big-budget, big-name shows like Westworld have now fallen prey to this. Big parts of our culture can just get thrown in the bin if some MBA decides it's what's needed to squeeze a few more pennies out of their bottom line? To me, that is unacceptable. The cultural preservation angle is the best thing about piracy IMO.
Even with all the madness, some content doesn't seem available anywhere for any price. I recently tried to track down The Abyss (1989), a scifi classic by James Cameron. It's currently not on any digital platform and the physical discs appear to be out of print. The only way to watch this movie seems to be piracy or buying a second-hand disc on eBay.
So, I mean, I know that not everyone loves The Lord of the Rings movies. But I just need everyone to remember that Peter Jackson did them. And I mean, I thought Heavenly Creatures was really interesting, and I think I'm one of the dozens of people who really liked The Frighteners (yes, I'm a hipster Frighteners fan.) But if you'd asked me, "Viking, should we trust Peter Jackson to make 11 hours and 21 minutes of The Lord of the Rings (extended editions)?" I would have said, "No," and I would have, in my humble opinion, been totally completely wrong.
I mean, I just need to remind people that great movies exist. LA Confidential. The Matrix. Hell, even the Fugitive is a lot of fun (for what it is.) Mr. Robot is simultaneously amazing and also boring as shit for huge stretches - but man, they committed to that vision, and when the big moments hit, they hit hard. True Lies. True Romance. The Abyss. The Fisher King. Good Will Hunting. Inglourious Basterds. Hell, even Hackers. And Sneakers.
I think Daemon and Freedom could be done wonderfully.
Just imagine ending the series with a nice cackle...
"I do so enjoy my vork..."
3D animation reached new heights in Hollywood with movies likes The Abyss (1989) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). The acclaimed liquid tentacles in The Abyss and the liquid metal terminator in Terminator 2 were both made using an animation technique known as metaballs...
The interesting thing about Blade Runner and almost all modern sci-fi and cyberpunk is that they all took their influence from one single comic, The Long Tomorrow, by Dan O'Bannon and Jean Giraud (aka Moebius).
Dan and Moebius were working on Jodorowsky's Dune. During a slow period, Dan was bored and started drawing a comic. Moebius saw this and offered to rework it a bit. Their collab appeared in Heavy Metal (Metal hurlant) magazine. Ridley Scott used this comic as visual inspiration for Blade Runner. William Gibson even credits this comic for Neuromancer. Other movies influenced by this comic, or the art of Moebius include Tron, Heavy Metal (based on the magazine comics), The Fifth Element, and The Abyss. And, of course, pretty much everything else that came later such as The Matrix or video games like Deus Ex.
It's crazy to think about all the what-ifs with Jodorowsky's Dune. If he did not bring Dan and Moebius together, we wouldn't have Blade Runner (or a vastly different one). If Dune didn't fall apart, Dan wouldn't have gone and written Alien. If Alien didn't happen, Ridley Scott may not have known about Dan O'Bannon or Moebius, and never have done Blade Runner.
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind was also influenced by Moebius, according to Miyazaki. Look at Azrach (again, Metal hurlant magazine) and the similarities are obvious. The French were really ahead in illustration and animation at one point, and don't often get the credit they deserve. Go and look at what René Laloux was doing with Fantastic Planet, Time Masters, or his short films. Some of this stuff still blows my mind.
How hard did you look?
From https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096754/trivia/ (which is incidentally the third Google result[0] for "the abyss american humane"):
"The American Humane Association rated this film "unacceptable" because of the rat that was submerged in oxygenated liquid in one scene."
From the same page:
"James Cameron later admitted that four rats had indeed gone through the procedure without problems; the fifth, however, suffered a cardiac arrest. Fortunately, Cameron was able to revive it through careful chest compressions, and later kept it as a pet."
From the article linked in the original comment:
"Supposedly, the only purpose for the cuts in the sequence was to avoid showing the rats defecating from panic."
And you need only watch the scene to see a rat in enormous distress. I'm not sure what more you want.
[0] The first Google result is an explanation from American Humane themselves that they "were told there were no animals in the film. Therefore, AHA was not aware of the scene involving the rat and was not on the set."
Remind me of a scene from The Abyss (movie 1989). The main heroine deliberately enter hypothermia underwater hoping to be revived few moments later and after a apparently hopeless CPR she finally come back from the death.
Turn out this part was actually quite realistic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abyss
Clicking through the reviews on Rotten tomatoes and it got quite a lot of hate though ending up with a high score. It was novel which attracts praise, but again people genuinely seem to like the look of CGI.
Anyway as long as we are talking animation. I asked one of the Frozen animators why the faces looked so freaky and they basically said meh, needs to be distinct to sell toys. Serious props to their skills and the massive R&D involved but that right there was the core issue. Moana’s water does a lot of cool animations but looks vastly less “real” than the objectively worse CGI water tentacle in Abyss. Again same deal it’s aiming for a style.
Ok fine you say what about CGI in blockbuster movies, except the article again points out how fake they look for various reasons.
The Abyss was another film James Cameron made shortly before T2, and I remember being mesmerized by how realistic it looked. Not sure what (if any) distinction there is between its CGI and T2’s, but this Wikipedia article claims The Abyss had the first 3D water effect:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computer_animation_in_film_and_television#
Take a look at what Cameron did on The Abyss:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096754/trivia
> Ed Harris reportedly punched James Cameron in the face after he kept filming while he was nearly drowning.
The problem with your wager is that on a long enough timeline, the doomsayers are always right.
So saying anything OR societal collapse is going to evaluate to true.
There are any number of disasters, both terrestrial and cosmic, that can radically change the landscape of the Earth.
I also don't really find discussions about what's going to happen beyond our lifetime that interesting for the most part. Often, they're just fantastic wishing attached to some loose thread of logic.
The Island
Escape from New York
The Running Man
Akira
Strange Days
A Scanner Darkly
Back to the Future II
Blade Runner
2001: A Space Odyssey
2010: The Year We Make Contact
Death Race 2000
1984
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Freejack
Westworld
Real Steel
Pacific Rim
12 Monkeys
The Abyss
Timecop
And a host of other films and books are set in futures that are now our past. And while some of these are fantasy designed to entertain, they all make assumptions about what would be possible by that time. And we have fallen woefully short of those predictions. So short, that "flying cars and meals in pill form" is a meme about such predictions.
Documentaries
- Citizenfour 2014: Actual interview between Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden
- Voyage of Time: Life's Journey 2016: Voyager probes development and deployment
- Zero Days 2016: The background story and effects from Stuxnet
Films
- The Challenger Disaster 2013: Dramatization of Richard Feynman and his investigative work of this event
- Batteries Not Included 1987: When mechanical-based lifeforms descend into NYC to help an elderly couple
- Pi 1998: Fun film with lots of computers and wiring
- I Am Mother 2019: Post-apocalyptic robotic "rejuvenation" of the human race
- Gravity 2013: Fairly accurate dramatization of what space is really like
- Real Genius 1985: Silly film of college hackers before the 1995 film Hackers
- The Abyss 1989: Aliens under the sea, somewhat related to the 1998 film Sphere
- Innerspace 1987: Fun scifi version of Honey I Shrunk the Kids!
which was made into a movie
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_(1998_film)
that is confusingly similar to The Abyss,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abyss
I always get the two confused.
Yes it was "The Abyss", see the rat scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6hw4dGhm8Y
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abyss "The breathing fluid used in the film actually exists but has only been thoroughly investigated in animals.[5] Over the previous 20 years it had been tested on several animals, who survived. The rat shown in the film was actually breathing fluid and survived unharmed"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_breathing
> "...They settled on liquid perfluorocarbons, which can absorb large amounts of oxygen and are often used as a blood substitute or to assist the ventilation of premature babies...."
Reminded me of the scene from an old underwater sci-fi flic (? was it 'The Abyss' https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0096754/), where the deep-divers had to learn how to 'breathe' the oxygenated liquid instead of air.
Speaking of liquid, there was also an example of 'fluid animation' (is it the term?), later also seen in Terminator 2 (the unkillable and self-reassembling T-1000) and other movies.
I believe the liquid they are mentioning was featured in the movie The Abyss. It is painful for humans to breathe the liquid. But apparently giving you an enema with it works! Amazing.
Funny coincidence that two days ago I rewatched James Cameron's 1989 movie The Abyss, in which perflourocarbon breathing features as a major plot device. Great movie!
The novel of "The Abyss" gives you more character motivation for Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio's character Lindsey Brigman who designed the deep sea oil platform. You obviously won't have time to do that in a movie, suppose you shoot twenty minutes of a plausible 10-year old Lindsey having formative experiences as a little girl, when you're cutting you will leave every frame of that on the floor to keep more of the incredibly expensive underwater shoot, or the incredibly expensive CG, or the action. So it makes no sense to even shoot it.
So I liked that, because I feel the movie does leave her under-motivated as it stands.
But the film is pretty amazing, I just think it benefits from the book existing to explain Lindsey better.
I read the Star Wars book before the film was released in the UK. An interesting experience, given that novelisation of film usually goes "the other way" experientally. Film-of-novel is of course far more common.
In some ways, the book was better than the film.
(I read Abyss after the film, which I think was Orson Scott Card. I think the film is better than the book)
You can hear it in the movie The Abyss as well, since Cameron is a stickler for accuracy.
IIRC the rig was moved out of place. they were already having massive problems at that point in the film.
fun facts about the abysss.
1. it's a version of the divine comedy, particularly the inferno.
2. the set still exists as of a several years ago
https://io9.gizmodo.com/take-a-tour-of-the-abandoned-remains-of-the-abyss-movie-5841253
Reminds me of the fantastic movie The Abyss (1)...vaguely recall a similar scene where there's N tanks of oxygen for N+1 people, so they submerge 1 of the crew to lower her (i think) metabolic rate.
Curious why they don't have emergency unmanned drones with the crew or why they don't have emergency tanks at their work site (which he was able to get back to)
(1) - Not sure how well it has aged (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abyss)
And Leviathan (basically Alien in the ocean; from 1989 when everybody seemed to be making ocean movies to compete with Cameron's The Abyss) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097737/
>That's a pretty good B-movie plot.
It can be good... in the right hands.
We're all debating various complex semantics when the only thing that ultimately really matters is talent... who ultimately is in control of these building blocks. Talent with the director, talent with the screenplay, talent with the acting, etc.
There has been plenty of dumb plots, stories, concepts, etc that have been turned into great movies by talented people. Reservoir Dogs, Clerks 1, Napoleon Dynamite, The Abyss, etc would all sound dumb, boring, or cliche on paper, but were made highly watchable by talented film makers working in their prime.
Just like startups, the only thing that matters is people, not how clever your original idea is. You could have the perfect movie idea, which many big budget have had (which translate well into trailers and per-release marketing), but turn out to be awful once it's turned into the 1.5hr+ long final product.
12 Monkeys - Travelling back in time to try and track the outbreak of a virus that wipes out most of humanity.
The Abyss - Survival and discovery on a deep water mining platform.
Apollo 13 - Look at the rescue efforts of this historical NASA moon mission. (Does it count as sci-fi?)
The Dish - Also not quite sci-fi, but a comedy about Australia's involvement in the first moon landing.
Battle for Terra - Surprisingly good animated movie about invading aliens.
District 9 - Alien refugee camp in Johannesburg.
Gravity - Astronaut stranded in orbit, trying to get back to Earth.
The Martian - Survival and rescue of a lone astronaut stranded on Mars.
Moon - After a serious accident, a solitary worker on the Moon discovers a conspiracy.
Oblivion - A veteran assigned to extract Earth's remaining resources begins to question what he knows about his mission and himself.
Predator - The classic that launched the franchise.
Predestination - Faithful adaptation of Heinlein's short story, "All You Zombies."
The Prestige - Some minor sci-fi elements. At the end of the Nineteenth Century in London, two stage magicians engage in a battle to create the ultimate illusion whilst sacrificing everything they have to outwit the other.
Source Code - Using limited time-travel to try and get information to stop a second, larger terrorist attack.
WALL E - In the distant future, a small waste-collecting robot inadvertently embarks on a space journey that will ultimately decide the fate of mankind.
What I instantly thought of was `The Abyss`. It was referenced towards the end and it appears the rat -and not the actor- was submerged in this fluid. Very cool! http://www.nytimes.com/1989/08/06/movies/film-the-abyss-a-foray-into-deep-waters.html
The Abyss and Avatar were both made after Aliens. How can Cameron reusing themes from Aliens in those movies be a criticism of Aliens?
Cameron made some really outstanding movies, but I at least don't count Aliens among them. The Abyss was more than amazing for me.
Part of the problem is James Cameron reusing the same themes and tropes in all of his movies. The Abyss and Avatar are pretty similar to Aliens thematically.
Yes. :) Remember, this was a movie aimed at dudebros, and was not nearly so highbrow as The Matrix. In fact Sena wanted the scene where Stanley codes the worm to have graphics that resembled an actual worm. He cited the water tentacle from The Abyss as the sort of thing he was going for.
According to this NYT article[1] the rat was indeed submerged in the movie (the scene wasn't faked). The article also states that it's been tested successfully on numerous animals - and even one human (although apparently they almost died in the process).
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/1989/08/06/movies/film-the-abyss-a-foray-into-deep-waters.html
> See also the film "The Abyss" in which a rat is submerged in an oxygenated fluid ...
And then a person, if the events in the film can be taken as reflecting reality.
See also the film "The Abyss" in which a rat is submerged in an oxygenated fluid, thus breathing the liquid. This technique is used for some military diving.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_breathing)
> Regardless of what one may think of his movies; this is bad ass.
Hmmmmm.... Aliens, Titanic, Avatar... not to mention Terminator, T2, The Abyss. Many people consider his movies to be bad ass and innovative as well. He's one of the very few directors where I can count on him setting his own bar so high that I'm going to love whatever he makes. Along with Ridley Scott and Spielberg, and more recently Nolan and Fincher joining their ranks, in my eyes.
reminds me of the film Abyss
The Terminator, Terminator 2 and Aliens are his best in my opinion. The Abyss is also quite good but not as much of an action movie.
Notable films from: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000116/#director
Titanic (1997) Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) The Abyss (1989) Aliens (1986) The Terminator (1984)