My whole life, I’ve tended to gravitate toward the cinematic adaptation of a true story.
Nothing makes the viewing of a film better than the hair-raising realization that real people were once put into certain situations. Although watching a fantastic movie is already an all-encompassing experience for me, there’s something about a truthful account that makes it more memorable than anything else.
I’ll admit that when I first came across The Abyss, I thought it was a newer adaptation of the 1989 film of the same name about an underwater recovery operation; however, after finding out how different it was, I knew it would strike the same fear in my heart that the deep unknowns of the ocean would.
The movie follows the real events of a crumbling mining town in Kiruna, Sweden, told from the perspective of Frigga (Tuva Novotny). As she strives to maintain stability in her work life—as a security manager at the world’s largest ore mine, Kiirunavaara—and her personal life, disaster strikes: Kiruna, which has slowly been pulling apart from the explosive blasts at the mine, forcing people to gradually relocate, is sinking into the hollow space their mining endeavors have created.
Feeling responsible for the catastrophe, Frigga walks right into the heart of the situation as she attempts to save the town and rescue her disconnected family.
In my honest opinion, although it’s currently in Netflix’s Top 10 Movies, I was expecting to like it a lot more than I did.
The film itself, being produced in Sweden, was entirely dubbed in English, but that didn’t bother me as much as other aspects of it did. I enjoyed the concept, but the finished product wasn’t exactly what I was expecting.
One of the first things I noticed as the credits began to roll was that nothing was necessarily a surprise. I had never heard this story before, but I ended up predicting every major event that happened. I don’t mind the predictability of a film if it is executed well—or if it’s a comfy romantic comedy—but having a plot I was able to see straight through made my experience watching it quite dull.
The cliché storyline of having a supposedly vulnerable side character end up being a major hero only added to my dislike of the clunky way it was implemented.
Also, the movie jumped around quite a lot. One minute I was watching Frigga, her ex-husband, Tage (Peter Franzen), and her co-worker, Erika (Angela Kovacs), try to reverse the effects of the cave-in, and then I was witnessing Frigga’s boyfriend, Dabir (Kardo Razzazi), help her daughter, Mica (Felicia Maxime), find her brother that’s been missing since the collapse.
Although there were quite a few storylines, they did converge again at the end in a smoother fashion than I was expecting based on the rest of the film.
One of the only things that saved this was its unique humor that was sprinkled throughout. The beginning scenes between Tage and Dabir perfectly encapsulate the awkwardness and instantaneous dislike they had for each other. There were even some situations that occurred because of their immediate rocky relationship that genuinely made me laugh.
However, those scenes were minimal and only contained in the beginning of the movie. I wasn’t expecting any humor at all, so it was a little shocking, but the effort put into the comedic aspects could’ve served a much better purpose elsewhere in making it more than just a decent film.
