Director: James Cameron
Cast: Ed Harris, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Michael Biehn, Leo Burmester
Have I Seen it Before: Huh. Weird question. Maybe? I can’t imagine I spent all of this time avoiding the film, but I really don’t have much memory for it.
Did I Like It: And why is that? Under one possibility, over thirty-plus years the film on spec never ensnared enough of my imagination to finally make a point to watch it*. Or did I see it, and it just didn’t make enough of an impact to get into any kind of regular re-watch cycle.
While Cameron’s skill with pacing is unassailable, I think there might be two things holding him back here.
First, while I enjoy an Alan Silvestri score just as much as the next guy, he seems to be doing merely perfunctory work here. Or, at the very least, Cameron is more naturally in sync with someone like Brad Fiedel, James Horner, or someone who has worked very hard to bring a James Horner quality to a James Horner-less world.
Finally, the special effects age not so well. The floating column of water now looks like not much more than cheap CGI, because it is. I’m tempted to eschew that criticism as unfair. Judging an entire movie by the aging of its special effects is a great way to stop enjoying a lot of films, but it feels like the entirety of the movie is incidental to proving the concept of the CGI creature. It didn’t work unassailably well ten years later for George Lucas and Star Wars — Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999).
*Although to be fair, Cameron is being unusually stingy with options to watch not only this, but most of his catalog. Whispers on the internet point to a 4K re-release being nigh, but there’s such a sellers market on physical media at the moment (derogatory), that I’ll believe it when I see it.