Welcome to AccessAtlanta!

accessatlanta.com

Ghosts of the Abyss

Titanically eerie, especially in 3-D.

FILM FACTS

Director: James Cameron
Rating: G
Genre: Documentary, IMAX

Discuss this film | Official movie site

See showtimes (G) 59 minutes

Grade: A-

Verdict: Take the plunge.

By STEVE MURRAY
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

He won 11 Oscars for "Titanic," but director James Cameron's obsession with the doomed ship has continued steaming ahead. That's good news if you want to experience the next best thing to riding a sub to the bottom of the North Atlantic and prowling around the sunken ocean liner.

In the spectacular 3-D Imax documentary "Ghosts of the Abyss," Cameron travels with a handpicked crew of scientists and his old acting buddy Bill Paxton to take another look at history's most famous shipwreck. It's the first film made with the Reality Camera System, co-invented by Cameron. It generates 3-D imagery so convincing, you may want to take a plastic bag for seasickness.

Paxton serves as our Everyman guide. While he's played men stuck in tight cockpits before (in both "Titanic" and "Apollo 13"), this time it's for real. And his very real anxiety pops when he gets sealed up with two crewmates inside a tiny Mir sub and admits it's "maybe a little more adventure than I wanted."

More than two miles below the waves, fear changes to wonder. There lies the rusting behemoth once considered, for five short days in April 1912, to be the man-made glory of the ocean before an iceberg sent it, and some 1,500 passengers, to a cold, black grave.

We've seen much of the ship before, a lot of it in Cameron's 1997 epic, which interlaced its fictional love story with real wreckage footage. But "Ghosts" trumps those images with the depth and clarity of the 3D process and the probing work of a couple called Jake and Elwood.

Those are the nicknames for ROVs, or remotely operated vehicles, two underwater camera-equipped robots small enough to navigate even the narrowest passageways of Titanic. (The gadgets were invented by Cameron's younger brother Mike.)

The 'bots penetrate the ship's fragile husk to show us things we've never seen before: the dining room's intricate leaded windows (still intact), a locked gate used to contain panicked steerage passengers, elaborately carved columns and mantelpieces, filigreed elevator doors, even Molly Brown's brass bed.

This would all be eye-popping enough, but Cameron deepens the impact by superimposing photos of the ship's original interiors, helping orient us on the journey. He also overlays scenes of actors playing passengers, re-creating key moments from the ship's last night. The technique reminds us of the human cost involved, climaxing in a re-creation of the ship's final plunge: As Titanic goes down, the screen fills with photos of its victims, hurtling through the dark night sky like shooting stars.

The film is such a visual triumph, it hardly matters that parts of it are arranged a little awkwardly. Scenes of the expedition's crew playing volleyball or eating borscht bump up against the eerie underwater images in ways that don't always gel. But when Cameron returns to the surface after one dive, the date is Sept. 11, 2001. News of the terrorist attacks in the United States brings an extra dose of sadness to this history of Titanic.

For the record, it wasn't the worst maritime disaster. Torpedoed by a Soviet sub in 1945, the German ship the Wilhelm Gustloff took nearly 10,000 passengers with it, many of them refugees, including wounded soldiers, women and children. But with its luxe trappings and purported unsinkability, the Titanic has monopolized popular imagination with the power of a classical tragedy. "Ghosts of the Abyss" gives that tragedy its due.