All over the place I see people referring to the undersea creatures as "aliens", when it's never even suggested that they're not from Earth. B'sides, the idea of a more advanced sapient species from our own planet is way more interesting.
- Apparently the book describes them as aliens. A terrestrial advanced race is cool, true, but not the case here.
- It's pretty much stated in the movie also—there's a short conversation involving One Night where the NTIs are implied to be from space.
- They're referred to as "non-terrestrial" several times in the movie. Admittedly, the characters have no good reason to make this assumption, but it's not just something the fans made up.
- Maybe "terrestrial" in this case refers to land-dwelling species?
- For what it's worth, the (incredibly obscure) game
pegs them as actual aliens.
I grew up in the final years of the Cold War, and so I understand the earnest, optimistic wish of this movie (and others in the genre) for some Benevolent Space Brothers to make us all get along - if necessary, by threatening us with annihilation unless we prove that Not All Humans Are Bastards. But take a look back from the safe side, and some serious Fridge Horror sets in: humanity's fate is now in the hands of beings beyond our reach (both physically and in technology), who still might decide to wipe us all out, at any time, for any reason. (Maybe we're killing too many tuna.) Or perhaps just "cull" us back to a more manageable, less polluting, pre-industrial level, or demand annual tributes of children, or anything else they feel like...
One thing this troper remembers very well from that era was the sense of helplessness, the faint fear always in the background that due to circumstances beyond one's control, the world might end today. The ending of "The Abyss" doesn't actually remove this Damoclean threat, it merely escalates it to the next level and takes the decision entirely out of our hands. Instead of human political and ideological rivals (whom we did, eventually, learn to get along with), we now have untouchable alien overlords. "God exists, and He's Atlantean."
And if one includes the mental influence shown/implied in the novel, we might not even be allowed to think this is wrong. Water-nanites in our brains, keeping us docile and content... everyone lining up on the beaches, neat and orderly, for our divine masters' next culling...
- Considering the guy that made this has a pretty obvious case of Human Guilt, he probably does in fact think we'd all be better off with benevolent fascist aliens controlling our every move.
- I'm guessing whoever wrote the novelization had this same thought and decided to fix it, all of this is extremely unlikely if what the aliens take away from the course of events is "in sitting in judgement of a less advanced race we are being petty and juvenile so we need to grow up as much as we're telling them to."
- The author of the novelization was Orson Scott Card. He worked from the shooting script and was allowed to make what changes he thought would make the novelization work better as a novel.
- While it is fun to consider Fridge Horror scenarios, given the events of the film it's pretty safe to assume that the aliens are entirely benevolent. Even if you take the deleted ending as canon, it's hard to say they the aliens are not justified in making that non-lethal show of force, as they were forced to reveal themselves are were just about to be nuked by a deranged human.
Kitch here, with a thought I've had in my brain for years about the drowning scene.
Why didn't Bud start swimming the moment Lindsey was submerged? He waited to swim to Deep Core at least until she lost consciousness, and potentially longer (we don't know how long it was between his Big "NO!" and when he actually started swimming). That's a minimum of a minute (possibly more) that could've meant a more positive outcome to Lindsey's resuscitation, instead of ultimately needing a miracle. (The novelization says Lindsey really did die, and the aliens actually revived her based on their reaction to Bud's desperation to save her.)
- When you drown you can't control yourself, so she'd be kicking and lashing all the way through. Arguably, she could have involuntarily hurt herself (and thus bleeding out), or even damage Bud's diving gear.
- Humans are also buoyant (which is why divers wear weights). She could've thrashed herself out of Bud's grip and quickly floated out of his reach, lost for good.
Why did Linds even have to drown in the first place? The water would flood the sumbersible up to the point of leakage and not above (the air remaining in the upper part would have to be removed first to allow more water in). Granted, there was not much breathable air, but for a person remaining perfectly still, the hypoxia would take some time to set in. Bud would have enough time to swim to the rig, get a working scuba apparatus and return for her, and the crew would have time to prepare for the medical emergency. Considering the director had an education in physics, this is a glaring f-up.
- The water clearly fills the entire mini-sub before Lindsey drowns, so there must have been enough damage to the sub from the mini-sub fight to let the air out along with letting water in.
Why they were so adamant to disarm that nuke? Nuclear weapons are designed in such a way that a successful detonation requires a number of extremely precisely timed and deliberate operations to take place, and missing or getting one of it ever slightly out of sync prevents a detonation completely. Even if some form of circumventing this was possible, it would still require a substantial knowledge of physics, nuclear physics and engineering, as well as time and highly specialized equipment and tools. Nuke is not something you just set a timer or push a button and it explodes. Even putting a conventional explosive next to it and blowing it up would result merely in a nuclear contamination and not an explosion. They could safely wait some time and mount a proper recovery operation rather than a very risky and nearly suicidal dive.
- Because supposedly the Phase III section of the SEALs' plan involved setting the weapon to detonate. (Phase II, shown on screen, was retrieving and arming the weapon.) In all likelihood, such orders were drafted as a last-ditch resort to keep the Soviets from getting their hands on the sub, its technology, and its intel - not that farfetched an idea, as this is exactly why the US spent the equivalent of $4 billion on Project Azorian in 1974: to capture a sunken Soviet sub. Basically an "if we can't have it, nobody will" fail-deadly solution. Coffey, in his deranged state, applied that precaution on his own initiative to the NTI situation as he viewed them as an enemy. This the SEALs would've been provided with the necessary equipment and tools to properly rig the weapon.
- If anything, the nuke not having the stereotypical and very obvious LED display on a time bomb is actually a more realistic take on the scenario. Having Coffey read the Phase III instructions, say they are going to repurpose it to attack the aliens, and showing them working on the nuke would add nothing to the movie, there is enough info already for us to fill the blanks and understand what happened offscreen. This is a case of complaining that a movie isn't treating the viewers as morons.
The rig had two submersibles. Why didn’t they just take those to get out right from the start? Surely being cramped or having to make a couple of trips is better than dying.
- Deep Core is submerged in about 1000 or so feet of water. Lindsey mentions earlier in the film that it would take three weeks to undergo the decompression process to avoid a painful death from the bends (nitrogen bubbles forming in tissues), so evacuating the ship with the submersibles is not a viable option. Even if the Benthic Explorer had decompression chambers topside, due to the hurricane, it would be functionally impossible to recover the subs and get everyone in the chambers quickly enough before death.
