The self-proclaimed King of the World is making his way back to mainstream cinema. After over a decade working as a documentarian on subjects ranging from the Titanic to the tomb of Jesus, Cameron is set to return later this year with Avatar, a film whose technically and physically demanding shoot has been the subject of huge amounts of speculation. The film is said to be technically, extraordinary, rewriting the cinematic grammar of science fiction in much the same way Cameron has done twice before, with Aliens and The Terminator movies.
However with its demanding shoot and cutting edge filming techniques, Avatar seems closer to The Abyss, a Cameron movie that’s been largely overlooked. Which is a surprise as the simple act of shooting The Abyss was a Herculean undertaking, involving re-fitting a half-constructed nuclear power station to become a huge water tank. The cast and crew were under water for hours at a time and frequently had to spend up to twelve hours in decompression chambers, and the shoot was so difficult that Ed Harris refused to talk about it for years after filming. Acknowledging this, on completion, the cast and crew were all given t-shirts bearing the caption:
LIFE’S ABYSS AND THEN WE DIVE.
But despite, or perhaps because of this pressure, it’s the Cameron movie I keep coming back to. I’d even argue it’s his best and certainly his most personal work. Cameron’s background as a special effects technician has shown throughout his career and there are few directors better at shifting the focus of action from epic scale to individual people and back again, especially here. He’s as comfortable with quiet, personal character moments as he is with massive set pieces and the skill with which the two are nested within one another here is never less than impressive.
The crane crash sequence is particularly impressive as Cameron throws the focus around at tremendous speed but with absolute discipline. We follow the Benthic Explorer, the Deepcore II’s support ship as it battles high seas and loses the crane carrying the Deepcore’s umbilical. The action then cuts to the seabed as the crew frantically try and unbuckle the cable as the crane crashes down on them, fail, are dragged over the lip of the Marianas Trench and come to rest, only to be forced to battle hull leaks and fires at multiple locations. It’s an almost balletic sequence, each section building on the last and each driving home how fragile, how alone the Deepcore II crew are and how, in a second, the crew’s safe environment can become a roiling, chaotic death trap. The fact that the Deepcore II looks and feels utterly convincing only helps ramp up the tension. This rig is these people’s home and it‘s critically damaged almost before the film is halfway through.
But for all the undoubted technical skill on display here, it’s Cameron the scriptwriter who most impresses. The Abyss is a Russian doll of plots, each presenting a canvas for the other plot lines to play out across and each successively tighter in focus.
The largest sees Cameron borrow a trick from 2010, and use a fictionalized version of the Cuban Missile Crisis as both the catalyst for the story and a means of providing it with extra historical weight. The accidental crash of a US nuclear submarine not only brings the Deepcore II crew into the incident but also brings the Cold War into the spotlight. By doing this, Cameron establishes an instant intellectual connection with the Cuban Missile Crisis and its potential consequences, in turn raising the dramatic and emotional stakes of what is, superficially, a summer blockbuster filled with empty spectacle.
The next story down from that addresses the empty spectacle head on, as Cameron builds an action movie that is arguably larger and more completely realized than any of his other work. The crane sequence mentioned above, the bruising submarine chase and Bud’s final dive into the abyss are just three of the major action beats in a film that rarely pauses for breath. Cameron has a rare fondness for practical effects work and the ease with which the film not only shifts scale but type of effect is never less than impressive. The arrival at the USS Montana is a particular standout, the chunky, tough ‘pick up truck’ submarines of the Deepcore II crew dwarfed by the immense scale of the downed submarine.
The summer ‘tent pole’ movie in turn provides a unique spin to the science fiction plot. Cameron is on record as saying that he wanted a very realistic, grounded approach to the fantastic in The Abyss and that’s exactly what is delivered. The blue collar main characters, Bud in particular, bring a welcome cynicism to events and their realistic approach puts a different perspective on what is at heart nothing more than a first contact story and a relatively conventional one at that.
Until the water tentacle sequence, where everything changes. As the aliens explore the rig and make contact with the crew, the accepted wisdom of special effects technology is shattered. Cameron’s use of CGI, the first in a major film, is elegant and effective even today, using the relatively simple shapes and textures of the tentacle to side step technical problems. It also fits, perfectly, with the rest of the film, a seamless integration of the unreal with the real, the alien with the mundane. The process of evolution, the changes that would lead through Independence Day to films like The Matrix and Donnie Darko and revolutionize SF cinema, starts here. The water tentacle isn’t just an alien artefact; it’s the shape of things to come, a moment of 21st century cinema arriving a little early.
It also provides the backdrop to the final, central plot. Cameron, for all his fascination with scale and technology, is passionately concerned with people and never more so than here. The Abyss is a literal and psychological presence in the film, each character faced with the realization that they have stepped beyond the bounds of safety and human knowledge, and that they are staring at the unknown. How they react to that knowledge is what drives the central conflicts of the film, and does so in a remarkably even handed way.
For Lindsey, the abyss is an open door, with the promise of boundless knowledge beyond it. For Bud, it’s a problem at best and a threat at worst and for both of them, it’s a reminder that what they need most is not knowledge, or freedom, but each other. Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio are on stunning form here and they have a quiet, unforced chemistry that is completely believable. Whether it’s Lindsey telling a sleeping Bud to turn over and him obeying or the pair frantically brainstorming ways to save a freezing Lindsey’s life their relationship is realistic, plausible and frequently very moving. They’re not perfect and they’re not heroes, they’re just the people who happened to be there, doing their best.
The rest of the cast are as naturalistic and impressive but the other stand out is Michael Biehn as Lt. Coffey. Biehn is a Cameron alumnus and, in a kinder world, would have been catapulted to mainstream success in Cameron’s abandoned Spiderman movie. Here, he plays Bud’s alter ego, a man as concerned with his job and his crew as Bud but lacking the human anchor Lindsey provides. Coffey is a genuinely good man, the script takes great pains to point that out but for him, the abyss is where the monsters live and he finds himself unable to move beyond that belief or, in the end, the abyss itself. Coffey is a tragic figure first and a villain second, the final casualty before the dawn of the new world waiting at the bottom of the old.
The Abyss is immensely ambitious and meticulously constructed, the four plots harnessed together to create an incredibly powerful piece of drama. Its ambition outreaches its grasp in several places, most notably some of the final effects, but the film succeeds far more than it fails and fails bravely when it does. It’s a film both powered by and about change and change for the better, a fiercely optimistic story that’s been unfairly overshadowed by its stable mates. It’s Cameron’s best work and if Avatar is half as successful, then we’re in for something very, very special.
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Is it possible to be negative about SF? by Jonathan Cowie.
Is it possible to be negative about SF?
SF has so much going for it that even focussing on its dark, dystopic portrayals is positive… thinks one scientist…
If I could define and bottle whatever it is that makes SF for me such a meaningful, and relevant genre then I am fairly certain I could become reasonably wealthy if not outrageously so; such is the genre’s power. Yet whatever it is I am fairly certain (though could be wrong) that it is at least a cousin to the thing that turns scientists on, and science is undoubtedly the best tool to go about elucidating life the Universe and everything, including the relevance of 42.
Of course over the years (but interestingly far less so now than decades ago) I have encountered those who – on finding out that I am a bit of an SF aficionado – have attempted to rubbish the genre. ‘SF is only mindless escapism’ they might say: well SF certainly has it is escapist elements but it is not only escapist, besides, what is wrong with a bit of escapism after a hard day’s work? Or ‘SF is for dreamers’: so would you want to live in a world without dreams? Or ‘SF is for kids and children’: well I for one don’t mind being accused of being ‘young at heart’. Go on, if this is the worse you can do, taunt me some more…
Having said that I do have to confess that, as a scientist, for many years I did keep my SF interests fairly quiet at least as far as other scientists were concerned. Perhaps I should explain why. For several years I was involved in science publishing and a proportion of my work was analogous to that of a commissioning editor in fiction publishing. Here quality control is all-important. Had it been widely known that I was an SF buff it would have undermined some scientists’ confidence in my being an editorial gate-keeper. Worse, anyone who took rejection badly might use my genre interest in an appeal to my superiors with the argument ‘well what does he know about science fact as he is into science fiction’. Later (and still in part today) I moved more into (bio-)science policy analysis and policy lobbying, putting forward colleagues’ views to policy-makers. Here the last thing I need is someone to rubbish any message I may be delivering with an innuendo that it was born of SF and not science. Of course today, with much achieved and most of my career behind me, I simply do not care, but I did learn the need to be cautious lesson early on way back at college. You see back then it was known among the lecturers that I was a member of the student SF society (PSIFA since you didn’t ask). I remember well one day when I had to write an essay on something or other that involved environmental change and extinction events. It was 1980 and as it happened this father and son team had just that very week of my assignment submission had an intriguing paper published in the journal Science as to how an iridium spike around the time of the K/T boundary 65 million years ago suggested that a mountain dropped from space wiped out the dinosaurs. Naturally I devoted a fair bit of the essay to this hot-off-the-press research. It was new, it was exciting! However that essay got an extremely low mark with a note from the lecturer in effect saying that I was to stop confusing my interest in SF with my science studies. Needless to say straightaway I appealed pointing out the Alveraz and Alveraz et al paper that I had properly cited and provided a photocopy of it as evidence. The good news was that my mark was changed markedly upwards, but I learned that some folk do make unfair assumptions about a scientist with an interest in SF.
As said, these days I worry a lot less. Sure my lack of worry is in part due to my being a stone’s throw from retirement, but also I think the world has changed. Today we are living the mid-20th century SF dream of colour TV, computers in homes, satellite pictures from space accompanying mundane weather forecasts. There is cloning, therapeutic cloning, nuclear power providing over 9% of Europe’s total energy, amazing CAT and PET scan diagnostic imagery, pictures from the orbits of all the planets, the human genome sequenced (remember in the mid-20th century they did not even know what a gene was (only what it was roughly meant to be))… It would be easy to go on and on, and on… Heck, we even have Star Trek communicators, only our multifunction ones today are so much better. The bottom line is that we do live in a world that would be very science fictional from a mid-twentieth century perspective but that nowadays the average person accepts this. SF is not so strange and weird: it has become a little more mundane.
As you are reading this from a website, let’s take the internet as another quick example but this time actually forge a hard link to SF. The internet has its good guys (such as the SF & F Enthusiasts folk) and the baddies: last month my last book was e-pirated necessitating my publisher to send its legal team boys around. And so along with the benefits of the internet we also get cyber-crime. Of course while this might all seem very science fictional to someone from the mid-twentieth century, it would not seem strange to a mid-20th century SF buff: such a person would take our 21st century in their stride. After all years before William Gibson was writing about cyberspace (Neuromancer came out in 1984) we had other tales of cyberspace. Indeed exactly a decade earlier still John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider had something very close to the internet, as well as internet banking and cyberspace ID. It even had computer viruses (only that novel referred to them as ‘phages’ which in science terms are ‘viruses’ that infect bacteria). It is, for my money, hard to be negative about a genre that is so relevant to where we – as a species and as suite of cultures – are going.
Of course with such a notion we are perilously close to a statement such as ‘SF predicts the future’, which is of course patently not true. But then again the opposite, that ‘SF has no relation whatsoever to the future’ is almost paradoxically equally untrue. From where I stand (somewhere in environmental science straddling biology and geology but only ten minutes away from a cup of tea and the latest copy of 2000AD) SF can be a theoretical tool for exploring possible futures: it can be but it isn’t always, and even when it is it is ‘theoretical’ and not a ‘practical’ tool, for if it were then I would know next week’s national lottery win.
Predicting the future is difficult – trust me on this, I am a scientist and I do a fair bit of it as a scientist in a theoretical exploratory sort of way you understand. I remember John Brunner (let’s stick with him) once saying (at Novacon 7 in 1977 since you didn’t ask) that by now [then] we thought we would wake up and brush our teeth with a nuclear powered toothbrush. John pointed out that in fact this happens, just that the nuclear power pack is not in the toothbrush but in the power station supplying energy to the electricity grid into which the toothbrush is plugged. Yes, we live in a past SF future but our SF present is just a jump to the left: after all this is what happens when you do the time warp again.
One advantage of SF when it comes to this future gazing game is that SF is by definition ‘fiction’. In science we don’t have this let out clause and this is a right pain in the proverbial posterior when, for example, presenting scenarios as to what the planet might be like a century from now. I tell you, Harry Harrison had it easy!
I should at this point explain that I have a cherished copy of Harry’s Make Room! Make Room! (1966) with the query next to the man’s autograph that asks in capitals ‘SHOULD YOU HAVE READ THIS?’ You see in the late 1970s I was at school wondering what I might do at university with a set of science A-levels? Harry’s book kind of helped the decision along. Now if you have not read the book (which is about an overpopulated planet in the then future December 1999), it is an environmental classic, albeit a dark dystopia, and is one of the few SF books I know of that has an academic reading list as an appendix! You need to know that back in the middle of the 20th century for a while population growth was so fast that it was not just exponential but super exponential: the exponential growth rate was year-on-year itself growing! (In mathematical terms the logarithm of global population was not an upwardly sloped straight line but upwardly curved!) While we all hoped for logistic growth that would see the population level off, at that time (and at that point in the population curve) nobody knew whether it would level off or go on climbing into some Malthusian nightmare: hence the thinking that ferments something like Make Room! Make Room!
Some environmental science reports of the time reflected these concerns and so a (very rough by today’s standards) model of global human ecology was assembled and run backwards in time from 1970 to 1900, to see if it worked backwards, before running it forwards to 2100: if it could portray the past then it might portray the future. This model was used to underpin the Club of Rome’s report Limits to Growth (1972) I will not bore you with the details of the report suffice to say that it said that if we did not change our ways we were all doomed to a global Malthusian nightmare, even though it did also predict a levelling-off of population. For example it cited that key resources would become exhausted: indeed copper was estimated to run out well within in a couple of decades. Because such a nightmare did not come about many folk criticised the report as highly flawed, and indeed this is still a fairly common academic perception of the report today. But such critics missed the point; rather they missed the ‘if‘, for in many ways we did change our ways. In the case of copper, by the end of the 1970s extraction techniques had increased by such a degree that not only were we able to mine previously uneconomic ores, we were actually reprocessing the mounds of old spent mine tailings! Such environmental reports are not predictions of falling over some precipice but flag-waving warnings that we are straying close to some precipice. Of course this does not mean we should be complacent. If you actually look at the model output behind the report you will actually see that the actual crunch time for the planet was not around the end of the last century but is around the middle of this one when the model predicted that global population peaks (as we currently still expect it to) and the cheap oil runs out (which actually we currently expect long before then). We do need to continue to wave flags especially as, frighteningly, the Club of Rome computer model does not include a global warming dimension.
The thing is that in science (for example with the UN IPCC climate reports) we have these constraints of which SF simply does not have to worry. SF can therefore do a great job in waving flags even if its stories are over-the-top: the two now old but classic examples being Brave New World (1932) and 1984 (1949).
There is one final positive aspect to SF I wish to highlight, though I have already briefly touched upon it, and that is the genre’s ability to inspire. While SF might not help us understand science it can inspire us with sense-of-wonder and help us appreciate science. There are numerous examples (such as http://www.concatenation.org/science/sfbuilds.html this one from the UK) both anecdotal and quantitative that suggest that a good proportion of scientists were initially turned on to study science and have a science career with the help of SF. Here, given that science underpins our technologically-reliant economy and culture, SF makes a cash value contribution to our global society well above and beyond that associated with its own multi-billion pound (dollar) SF book, film, TV and computer game industries.
Now, all this is not to say that SF does not have its negative side. Is it possible to be negative about SF? Of course it is. As with any powerful tool or force it can be subverted: fire can equally cook a meal as burn down a house. But it is not for me to explore SF’s dark side as Thomas Disch has already ably done that for us as part of his Hugo-winning http://www.concatenation.org/nfrev/ourstuff.html The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of (1998).
And so here we are at the birth of the www.sciencefictionandfantasyenthusiasts.com/ Science Fiction and Fantasy Enthusiast’s website. It aims – we are told – is to celebrate all that is positive in genre fiction, to make an ethical stand, to do what is right and leave cynicism and negativity at the door, to concentrate on what makes us smile, what entertains us, and what brings light and joy to our SF, fantasy and horror worlds. That’s not to say there is no place for criticism – there’s plenty bad in the World. However, this little digital corner aspires to be a place for positive progression. Somewhere you will (hopefully) come if you want to smile and be entertained…
That’s what the Science Fiction and Fantasy Enthusiasts folk tell us. Bring it on I say!
Jonathan Cowie.
http://www.science-com.concatenation.org Jonathan Cowie is an environmental scientist who was for many years with the Institute of Biology (the professional body for British bioscientists) and for several served as its Head of Science Policy and Books. He has an interest (among others) in climate change and
his http://www.cambridge.org/9780521696197 2007 book was cited, on the UN’s World Environment Day 2008 by the UN Environment Programme, as one of the internationally leading, global warming university texts of the 21st century. (He wonders whether he will bump into Kim Stanley Robinson at next year’s Australian Worldcon?) On the SF fan front he was a conrunner in the 1970s and ’80s, has given numerous exotic science talks at British cons for over three decades ,and since 1987 has been one of the European scientists behind the multi-European SF Award-winning http://www.concatenation.org The Science Fact & Science Fiction Concatenation .
Posted by Andy Remic.
Posted in: Commentary.
Tagged: concatenation · jonathan cowie · sci-fi · science fiction · SF · writing