The Abyss

Easter egg: In the Special Edition DVD (with the white slipcover), if you go to the menu which tells about the equipment of "The Abyss", go to the "surface", where it talks about the wave and the Benthic Explorer. If you hit the up arrow on the wave, the plane flying overhead is highlighted. Select it to see a trailer for "True Lies," a movie that James Cameron directed.

Easter egg: In the Special Edition DVD (with the white slipcover), in the Imaging Station, if you go to the top of the stack of the videotapes and hit the right arrow button, the TV screen changes to say, "They mostly come at night. Mostly." Hit "enter" to see a trailer for "Aliens," a movie James Cameron directed.

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Mistakes

Factual error: [Special Edition] The Statue of Liberty is incorrectly shown to be facing the Narrows bridge.

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Quotes

Bud Brigman: The guy is on his own, he's cut off from his chain of command, he's showing signs of pressure-induced psychosis, and he has a nuclear weapon. So as a personal favour to me, could you put your tongue in neutral for a while?!

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Trivia

Trivia: The dead sailor harbouring a live crab, spooking Jammer out of his wits in the sunk submarine, is director James Cameron's younger brother Mike. The scene had to be shot several times to get it right, forcing Mike to hold the live crabs in his mouth, until the cry for "action", before releasing them. At one point he had to crush one with his teeth, as it gave him quite a bit of grief. Brotherly love immortalized.

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Questions

Question: Bud and Catfish decide to go outside of the rig, swimming out the bottom of one of the hatches. Also, when Bud and Lindsey are in the wrecked submersible they decide Bud will swim with the drowned body of Lindsey back to the rig. How could these three have made it by entering the outside pressure of the Abyss at 1 or 2 miles below sea level without wearing a dry suit like Bud wears while saving Lindsey? They all would have been crushed the instant they left the habitat or submersible.

Answer: At the depth you're asking about, the water pressure is not enough to crush a diver's unprotected body (which is mostly solid/liquid and thus relatively hard to compress). The only thing they have to worry about is their lungs (gases, and therefore things containing gases, are much easier to compress). This worry is addressed by the pressure and composition of the air that they breathe on the rig, in their submersibles, and in their air tanks - this air has different proportions of gases (especially oxygen) compared to surface air, and is also at a significantly higher pressure - high enough to counter the pressure of the water that deep. (Side note: another way you can tell the atmosphere they are breathing in the rig is set at the same pressure as the water at that depth is that there is open water in the moon pool - and it's not rushing in to fill the entire rig, which it would if the air pressure was less than the water pressure).

Aerinah

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