This has all of the James Cameron signatures, some before this and many that would come after it.

| Oct 22, 2024

The Abyss works so well as a straightforward thriller that the e.t. angle, basically Close Encounters of the Nautical Kind, almost feels like an afterthought.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 22, 2024

Even as The Abyss is Cameron’s least successful film in terms of profits—a bar he usually sets to record-breaking heights—the film negotiates his recurrent themes and lifelong fixations with more effort and sensitivity than any other in his career.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 27, 2024

While some elements are repetitive, it’s exceptional that the alien aspects are pushed to the back burner in favor of a more human story. It's not Cameron’s best, but it highlights his capabilities within the action-thriller genre.

| Original Score: B+ | Jan 9, 2024

The Abyss is an exercise in experimental and rogue filmmaking that is perhaps one of Cameron's most well known signatures.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 15, 2023

Fundamentally, The Abyss doesn't make much sense, but it's a superlatively well-made film with an unusual degree of emotional complexity for a science-fiction work.

| May 9, 2023

Blew my mind way back when it came out, and it blew it again in my recent revisit. James Cameron had already left his mark in water-related films, even before Titanic and Avatar. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 8, 2023

After all these years, James Cameron’s "The Abyss" remains the most intense movie I have ever seen.

| Original Score: A | Aug 24, 2022

The Abyss feels like his first attempt to make a film which cant be defined, clearly, as a James Cameron movie, and its probably why its amongst the worst of his efforts, while still being a very good picture.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 24, 2022

...an erratically-paced yet mostly rewarding drama...

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 14, 2022

If there was ever a monument to a director's hubris and terrible labor ethics, it's The Abyss.

| Jan 20, 2022

A must-see for fans of the genre and for its uncommonly competent handling of suspense.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Aug 31, 2020

The Abyss was the summation of everything Cameron had done before, and a statement of purpose towards what he would be doing next.

| Jan 20, 2020

Colossally ambitious, this logistically boggling and technically brilliant film from writer-director James Cameron is a visual tour de force, featuring overall, the greatest underwater sequences ever seen on film.

| Mar 10, 2015

The Abyss gains in some ways from its own Achilles heels, in a way most movies don't... its formal technique, its reckless obsessiveness, and its gutsy emotionalism are what I can't stop turning over in my mind.

| Original Score: B+ | Aug 4, 2010

One need not be a Cameron acolyte to recognise that The Abyss has aged better than some of the films that outshone it back in the day.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Dec 14, 2009

The movie was a bear to make and it shows onscreen, parading around a series of mesmerizing set-pieces that look deliciously hard-earned in ways our current CG-drenched filmmaking climate never allows.

| Original Score: A | Aug 26, 2009

A firstrate underwater suspenser with an otherworldly twist, The Abyss suffers from a payoff unworthy of its buildup.

| Jun 19, 2008

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 1, 2008

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 16, 2007