The Abyss

The Abyss (1989) — watch online James Cameron's deep-sea sci-fi thriller from 20th Century Fox, starring Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. Runtime: 140 minutes.

A US nuclear submarine goes down in the deep Atlantic. The Navy needs civilian help and pulls in the crew of a nearby underwater drilling rig. Rig foreman Bud Brigman (Harris) leads the dive team; his estranged wife Lindsey (Mastrantonio) runs the engineering side. Their unresolved marriage is one tension. Lieutenant Coffey (Michael Biehn) — a SEAL who is unraveling fast under pressure — is another. Then something moves in the dark water that is neither Navy nor Soviet.

Cameron filmed the entire picture inside a decommissioned nuclear reactor containment vessel in South Carolina, flooded with millions of gallons of water. No trick photography for the underwater sequences — the cast spent months in the tank. The film won the Academy Award for Visual Effects in 1990, partly for a sequence featuring a fluid alien entity, one of the earliest uses of CGI morphing in a studio release. Watch The Abyss (1989) online on iFILM.