GHOSTS OF THE ABYSS review

Yesterday, seems like its so far away… sorry, couldn’t help it. Here’s what I meant to say: Yesterday, I saw the future of gigantic event filmmaking.

It is funny to me, folks leveling “LAZY” tags on James Cameron for “doing nothing” for the past five years, but in reality… He’s literally been working on saving cinema as we know it. For the past several years, we’ve watched as films have been reduced to files to be transferred in chat rooms and from computer to computer. There’s a lot of us that know that would never replace the theatrical experience, and certainly… it never will. However, there are a lot of people out there, that dismiss the theatrical experience in lieu of getting a bunch of friends over to their house and watching a film early. The quality dip is off-set by the ability to drink beer, shoot the shit… the basic luxuries of home.

What effect is this having on film itself? Well, it is nearly impossible to measure, but when you see a film like Vin Diesel’s A MAN APART open with a whimper, when XXX opened like a leviathan. You kinda have to wonder if the fact that A MAN APART has been being seen online for nearly 9 months had anything to do with it. Or did New Line knowing that it had been online, make them not promote the film as widely as they ordinarily would have? OR could the public smell that A MAN APART was a pretty shitting Vin Diesel flick and stayed away? I don’t know and neither can anyone else.

HOWEVER… 3D can’t be captured with that DV camera in a theater. In fact, all the DV camera would get is a nasty double image that nobody would try to watch at home. And sure… 3D has been attempted before. It was supposed to be a revolution a good 50 years ago, but it really was nothing more than a fad.

Folks got headaches, eyestrain and tuned out of the process. Well, I watched the 3D camera shooting on Robert Rodriguez’s SPY KIDS 3D set earlier this year. Watched the Gerry rigged 3D screen that served as the playback monitor and it was quite impressive. I did not get to see any of that footage screened in 35 mm. Here… On Cameron’s GHOSTS OF THE ABYSS, I had the chance to see that and folks… it is absolutely gorgeous.

With everything being in 3D and in sharp 3D… no ghost images (except those that Cameron digitally placed within the film) this was the best non-IMAX 3D I’ve ever seen. The saddest part as I watched the screen, I realized this was the WORST the film would ever look and it looked fantastic.

GHOSTS OF THE ABYSS won’t be showing up for File Transfer, and if it did, you wouldn’t be getting it in 3D. As a result, you’d miss an extra layer of coolness. Watching Paxton squeeze into that 3-man submarine… listening to him quiz the Sub operator about oxygen levels, reacting to the sounds of the ocean’s pressure on the sub… it was priceless… But what did 3D add to it? Those are claustrophobic tensions that Paxton was expressing, and in the 3D photography, you could begin to get that dimensional feel of just how confined it was in that Sub. There just wasn’t any room in there, and you could get a real sense of spatial distances.

Cameron was trying out a lot of different things with these cameras… Distant vista shots, tight close-ups, medium shots, skewed angles, low light, bright day time shots… GHOSTS OF THE ABYSS is a filmmaker playing with a new toy… but the film is more than that.

GHOSTS OF THE ABYSS, for me, is a super-geek film. A film of enormous passion. Sometimes we try to put our fingers on why something is cool, but… well, I’m sorry… Getting on a Russian ship, heading out to the middle of the North Atlantic, getting in two submarines with a camera that nobody has ever used before, with a pair of robots invented for the shoot, with a lighting array created especially for this… To dive to the deep dark bowels of the earth to shoot the remains of the greatest and most infamous accident of all time, to capture it’s haunting desolation and bring it to life for an audience that could never be here in 3D… THAT’S FRICKIN’ COOL!

I love history. My parents raised me with a fetish for film history and real history. Taking me to the pyramid sites throughout South America and Central America. We’d sleep on the floors of grass huts, bathe in jungle waterfalls as crocodiles swam up stream. The whole time they’d tell me stories about the Mayans… and I’d look at a sacrificial stone and imagine a pulsating heart upon it. I’d look at the ball court of Palenque and imagine the feathered and armored players, literally playing a sideways version of basketball, where the losing team lost everything including their lives.

I’ve never lost that imagination. Hell, even when I go on sets, I see what isn’t there. Like that trip to Minas Tirith I took, or watching the Fellowship at the doors of Moria fighting the watcher in the lake…. There were no tentacles, but I could imagine them. Walking into the set for THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES in Beijing and remembering what I had read in the script and imagining it taking place here… It’s the sort of thing that gets ya all geeky and excited.

Well, in GHOSTS OF THE ABYSS, James Cameron completely gets that. He wanted the world to see what he saw when he looked at the deck, the staterooms, an old mirror, the remnants of a 4-story engine… Contrary to popular belief it isn’t dollar signs… it is the ghosts of history. Cameron is a TITANIC geek… He loves diving in the submarines and discovering the past. You can see it on his beady little face… He is geeking out something fierce here. So is everyone. Watch Lewis Abernathy as he discovers Captain Edward Smith’s bathtub… Or the disappointment when Cameron’s little robot got into Molly Brown’s stateroom and he saw a wood bed, and he knew that Molly Brown had written about staying in a brass bed… and then the joy when he discovers the Brass bed in the same room. GEEK! And I love it!

GHOSTS OF THE ABYSS is a far better film than TITANIC in terms of communicating the sadness of what happened. The genuine loss. Listening to Cameron as he talks about J Bruce Ismay… you sense a great deal of scorn and disgust. When bowler hats become gravestones because calcium doesn’t exist down here. THIS film, along with the technological advances… the film has a great deal of soul and melancholy. There’s something about those ghosts loading folks into lifeboats upon the rusticle decks that creates such an air of finality that it gets to you. This is a very emotional film for anyone with empathy.

The film is equal parts about the TITANIC and about ADVENTURE itself. The joy of discovery, innovation and making something work, that shouldn’t.

At the top of this article, when I said that yesterday, I saw the future of gigantic event filmmaking, I wasn’t just talking about GHOSTS OF THE ABYSS… I was also referring to that new MATRIX RELOADED trailer. To walk out of GHOSTS OF THE ABYSS, get home and watch that trailer… When Cameron makes this 3D Science Fiction-Action film of his… That’s it. He believes that he’ll be shooting all of his films in 3D from here on out. When the photography and 3D that I watched yesterday, meshes with the action and dynamics of that MATRIX RELOADED trailer… we’re going to have our teeth handed to us… and I, for one, cannot wait!

There will be a taste of that with SPY KIDS 3D… as Rodriguez is putting some pretty heavy duty Sci-Fi action beats in his film in 3D, but man… just the idea of James Cameron playing with this toy… making a James Cameron Science Fiction Action film… hehehehe… Oh Yes, Please!