AGW Entertainment reporter Lynn B. saw a new fantastic documentary film. Here are her thoughts on....

GHOSTS OF THE ABYSS

Buena Vista and Walden Media

Director James Cameron has a "thing" for Titanic. Not just his Oscar winning feature film but the ship itself. He grabs actor pal Bill Paxton, who played a modern Titanic explorer in the 1997 film, and dives down to the wreck with a brand new 3-D camera system.

In Ghosts of the Abyss, a new documentary, James Cameron, Bill Paxton, a variety of Titanic historians, scientists and explorers return on the Russian vessel Keldysh to the North Atlantic wreck site of the huge ship where they use two Mir submersibles, a nifty new 3-D camera system and two small, camera equipped ROVs to go where no man has gone since 1912, the deep interior of the wrecked Titanic.

This film looks awesome! First you look through an old-fashioned stereopticon device and see old black and white stereo postcards of the building of the great ship. Then on to the Keldysh where a seemingly reluctant Bill Paxton, the film's narrator, humorously finds his cabin and finally gets aboard one of the two submersibles for the long trip to the ocean floor. On the surface, fun 3-D effects put huge mechanical claws right in our faces and give us a "you are there" feel as the two submersibles are launched.

As soon as we submerge, and I say "we" because in this format, you do feel like you are there, we see bubbles seemingly inches in front of our faces as we take the long trip down. Once at the wreck site, those 3-D or "stereo" cameras (as Cameron prefers to call them) sweep the huge, rotting ship at close range and the two cute little "bots" or rovers named "Jake" and "Ellwood" tethered to the submersibles by long, thin, optic cords, take off like frisky puppies to explore staterooms, the grand staircase, a huge dining room with leaded glass windows still intact and other wonders not seen by human eyes since 1912.

A super cool effect are the "ghosts" of this abyss. Using a combination of the actual wreck, computer graphics and trick photography, Cameron shows us different areas on the ship as they are now, were then and superimposes ghostly actors over the scene to reenact desperate moments as the ship went down. All this is new footage with new actors. Only a couple of process shots of the ship sinking were borrowed from the director's 1997 mega-hit film. If I have to find a flaw, we do kind of get tired of Paxton's constant "gee-whiz" and "oh God" and "Wow" comments but hey, what would you be saying? He is supposed to represent an ordinary person's reaction to being there.

All the exploring is done with reverence and respect for the souls lost here so long ago. The fantastic footage is eerie, fascinating and well worth seeing in IMAX large format if you can although 35 mm prints of the film will be out as well. This one is a must, a history lesson with not one boring moment.

Rated: G

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