tederick.com reviews

• index
• tederick.com home

---

There are two things I'm fairly certain I'll never do in my lifetime:

1. I'll never walk the decks of the Titanic, circa 91 years ago today.

2. I'll never encase myself in a steel bubble and put two thousand miles of water above me, to visit the wreck.

So what is a 15-year Titanic fetishist to do? Turn to Iron Jim, of course.

Not only does James Cameron document the wreck of the Titanic in IMAX-tacular detail, not only does he populate her decks with the ghosts of the people who died there, he does the whole thing in 3-D. As such, for fleeting moments, Ghosts of the Abyss is as close as I'm going to come to fulfilling #1 and #2 above.

Unfortunately, the moments are fleeting. 3-D has yet to rise above its birthplace as a desperation tactic, and besides, the technology ain't quite there yet. Full-frame IMAX looks more lustrously dimensional than this trickery does half the time. I'm told that the camera system Cameron and his brother invented for Ghosts down-converts nicely to an old-fashioned 2D image. This is good - once the gimmick gets old, we'll still have the film to enjoy without the funky glasses.

Cameron's use of visual effects to superimpose simulations of moments aboard the Titanic onto footage of the wreck starts out nifty but suffers from being horribly overused. As a demonstration tool, it's top-notch, reminding us of the history of each location on the submerged hull. It also serves to break up the inevitable blending-together of so much rusted metal. But the trick does get old, especially late in the second act, when Cameron starts using it at a fever pitch. Between floating multiple ROV-POV's on the screen, overlaying footage from his Titanic film and the wreck and the new simulations, things go way off the deep end - too much information. The movie may be 3D, but our cognitive functions seem stuck in TV land.

Still, there are inescapable moments of gobsmacking power here. The best are the simplest - just floating along the destroyed deck, the 3-D working perfectly to make you feel like you're really there. The animation of old photographs (and new simulations made to look like old photographs) is also effective - with all this underwater photography, the snapshots serve to open the film up nicely. And a hysterical sequence where Cameron attempts to rescue a lost ROV is underlined perfectly by a casual reference to the date: September 11th, 2001.

Bill Paxton does a good job of encapsulating the "gee-whiz", out-of-his-element characterization of someone who definitely should not be on this cruise, yet is being swept away by the journey's revelations all the more for it. It would have been nice to get to know some of the other principals a bit better, particularly Lewis Abernathy, especially because Paxton gets kind of lost in the second half of the film, and there's no one to fill the void.

Cameron is striving into great unknowns with every aspect of Ghosts of the Abyss, from its take on high-pressure photography to its exploration of new ways to use IMAX. The result is an obviously bold experiment with mixed results, but I'll tilt the scale up: it made me feel like I was there.