Starring: Ed Harris, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Michael Biehn, Leo Burmester, Todd Graff, John Bedford Lloyd, J.C. Quinn, Kimberly Scott, Jimmie Ray Weeks, Chris Elliott

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By Jim Emerson

"I give this whole thing a sphincter factor of about 9.5,'' says one of the divers who's trapped on the edge of a black chasm at the bottom of the ocean in James Cameron's The Abyss. And while that line's a good example of the disarming, self-aware humor the characters (and the movie itself) use to occasionally release a little of the intense underwater pressure of The Abyss, it's also an ironic understatement. On a sphincter-factor scale of 1 to 10, The Abyss rates about an 11.

This mega-production from writer/director James Cameron and producer Gale Anne Hurd (the team who made The Terminator and Aliens) boldly desires nothing less than to be the most overwhelming, ambitious, tension-filled and breathtakingly exciting action-adventure/science-fiction/love story ever.

And for approximately 135 of its 140 minutes, it makes its claim spectacularly. The only let-down comes in the last five minutes before the end credits, but by then The Abyss has already blown you away several times over. By that point, you may just be grateful for the opportunity to catch your breath. (You can read about the movie's real ending -- before Cameron had to cut down the running time -- in the August (1989) issue of Cinefex magazine. Some spectacular effects, including massive tidal waves, originally tied together all of the movie's dramatic/thematic concerns, but were deleted to bring the film in at 2 hours and 20 minutes.)

Much has been written about the movie's high cost (estimated between $40 and $60 million, depending on your source), the arduous shooting schedule, the frictions on the set and the many grueling production and post-production delays that pushed the movie back from its original July 5 release date to August 9. But in this Biggest Movie Summer Ever, it turns out to be propitious that they saved the best for last. For in terms of action, character, story, performances, imagination, spectacle and thematic ambition, The Abyss blows Batman, Indiana Jones and Lethal Weapon 2 right out of the water.

Whatever The Abyss may have cost, it's all been sunk into the authentic, three-dimensional look of the film, which has a depth and immediacy that conventional optical special effects just can't match. The underwater "exteriors'' (40 percent of the movie) were shot in enormous tanks in an abandoned South Carolina nuclear plant. Nothing quite like it has ever been done -- or seen -- on film.

We plunge into The Abyss precipitously, the camera moving right through the title logo and into the ocean, where a nuclear submarine, the USS Montana, navigates 2000 feet below the surface of the Caribbean, along the edge of the seemingly bottomless Cayman Trench. From this moment, the movie's claustrophobic stresses intensify exponentially. When the sub is mysteriously incapacitated, the US Navy comandeers the crew of "Deepcore,'' a prototype underwater oil rig in the vicinity, to participate in the rescue mission. Deepcore foreman Bud Brigman (Ed Harris) suddenly finds his bottom-dwelling substation boarded not only by a four-man team of Navy SEALs under the command of Lt. Coffey (Michael Biehn), but by Brigman's estranged wife Lindsey (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), the "Iron Maiden'' who designed the Deepcore base.

From there, writer/director Cameron constructs an ingenious Chinese-box structure of urgent, suspenseful situations, one inside the other. So (without giving anything away), not only is there a potentially earth-shattering encounter with Something Big at the bottom of "the abyss,'' but there's an escalating international incident over the disabled submarine; a hurricane that cuts off power, air and contact with the surface; major leakage in an underwater vessel which is teetering precariously on the brink of a fissure; a crew member with a gun who's suffering from "pressure-induced psychosis''; personal animosity between Bud and Lindsay; a pet mouse who's about to drown... and so on.

Every time you get all worked up about one dilemma, Cameron creates a newer, more immediately threatening one inside or around it. Who has time to worry about global crises (or miscellaneous plot holes -- again caused by missing footage) when, say, your compartment is filling up with water or your excursionary craft is being chased and rammed by a berzerk paranoiac?

While the characters are gulping and scrambling for their lives, Cameron explores his submerged setting -- a world of unfathomable fears and wonders -- on deeper, metaphorical levels. The film's press kit quotes Friedrich Nietzsche: "When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks into you.'' The dark chasm the characters confront on the ocean floor is also reflected in the unplumbed depths of their own souls. But for all its Jungian unknown/unconscious terrors, there's also a primordial, womb-like quality to this underworld. Deepcore, for example, is connected to the surface world by an umbilical cord that, eventually, must be cut. And when one character tries on an experimental diving suit filled with a fluid of "oxygenated fluorocarbons'' that will enable him to descend to unheard of depths, he initially (and naturally) resists inhaling the liquid -- until he's reminded that we all breathed liquids for the first nine months of our lives. Although The Abyss is as physically and psychologically terrifying as its title suggests, deep at its core are buoyant images of rebirth.

The film's industrial/organic interior design recalls the motherships in Alien and Aliens. And, like those pictures, the cast consists primarily of rugged, wise-cracking blue-collar workers cut off from the rest of the world. Other, more metaphysical aspects of the picture are reminiscent of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. But, despite its firm grounding in action-adventure and science-fiction traditions, The Abyss (like its antecedents) is a genre-expanding/exploding original.

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