Walker

Ed Harris, dressed as an itinerant minister, stands rigid; his eyes bulging with mania as he preaches the good, indigenous-peoples-trampling word of white, American exceptionalism. Set in 19th century Central America, Walker, director Alex Cox's final fling with the Hollywood studio system, is an excoriating description of the wrong-headed madness that has gripped (and continues to ensnare) all manner of wealthy, upper class weirdos who see the world beyond their borders as a proving ground that can be twisted and tortured for their personal benefit. After a farcical coup attempt in Mexico, Walker wavers between settling down with his beloved, Marlee Matlin's Ellen, or journeying to Nicaragua to ensure that shipping lanes remain available to American business magnates during a civil war. 

Despite his obvious pomposity, there's a sweetness to the relationship between Ellen and Walker, perhaps because the sign language they use to communicate remains private and unknowable to the bores who blast Walker with their own, psychotic take on American foreign policy. The charmingly forthright Ellen is therefore able to castigate her blundering fiancé in secret and, when her death removes any other future for this hireling, Walker can sob and sign uselessly over her body while it lies in state. A tearful Walker is now finally able to completely embrace the dreadfulness of his bloodthirsty destiny. Harris plays Walker, a real-life mercenary obsessed with Manifest Destiny, as a man completely deranged by his own baffling sense of superiority. The United States and the democracy they claim to wield are, quite rightly, recognised as a religious fervour that empowers incredible deviancy. 

So, while early passages of Cox's film are positively Pythonesque in their arrangement - Michael Palin and Terry Jones' Ripping Yarns, specifically - later sequences, in which Walker talks up slavery while relics and pop-culture signifiers of the 20th century begin to bleed back into proceedings, are built on a similar sort of reckless, colonial misadventure as seen in films like Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Cox's film begins with the Universal Pictures globe, wreathed in Van Allen belts and proudly trumpeting its association with the MCA Company, then ends with Harris, directly addressing the camera, declaring that the United States will never leave countries like Nicaragua alone. Flimflam speeches from Ronald Reagan, intercut with images of a Nicaraguan wedding party shot to pieces in the 1980s by Contras, follow over the film's end credits. A creative decision that feels not so much brave but, in a 2026 where superhero blockbusters are routinely shelved for tax breaks, unrepeatably daring. 

The Abyss - Special Edition

The Abyss is a cacophony of drips. Anxiety rolls off the film in waves; the viewer made to feel the cold, pruning ache that comes with occupying a leaky metal box that has been sunken into the pit of the ocean. Tasked with providing a base of operations for Michael Biehn's jittery SEAL rescue team when an American nuclear submarine goes bottom up, Ed Harris' Bud Brigman, and the crew of the Deep Core experimental drill platform, suffer their way through a steady stream of escalating dangers. The personal hell of having to share a collapsing space with an inflexible ex-wife he's still very much in love with - Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio's Dr Lindsey Brigman - turns out to be a minor discomfort for Bud when compared to the litany of hazards that await them all beneath the waves. A flooded, Ohio-class tomb gives way to a series of close encounters compounded by swirling topside storms, a spiralling international crisis, and a dead-eyed psychopath who has taken possession of a Trident warhead. 

Rather than contrive a film's worth of interjecting hazards, writer-director James Cameron wrings drama out of his established milieu: bad oxygen tank mixes cause comas for minor players in the early going, while bulkheads buckle and burst when placed under incredible pressures as we plummet into the second act. These disasters don't present as contrivance either, they are a checklist of worst-case scenarios. The nightmare thoughts that have, quite obviously, crept in while Cameron was himself living through his own, practical research. Every calamity feels strangely inevitable then, the logical outcome of the film's obstinately perilous circumstances. Even Biehn's Lt Coffey, although happy to follow whatever apocalyptic orders are beamed down to him from his bloodthirsty superiors, explicitly suffers through a neurological episode caused by the intense physical strain of diving, then maintaining, the human body at so deep a depth. Typically a sensitive, even romantic proposition in Cameron's other films, this Biehn performance exists at the other end of the emotional scale. Coffey is tremulous and chlorine-stained; a highly strung soldier attempting to power through a failing physical and mental state by repeatedly drawing a boot knife across his own forearm. 

As great as Biehn is, the film belongs to Harris and Mastrantonio. The hysteria their later scenes generate is so strong - so violently and nakedly distressing - that they actually end up unbalancing the film, vanquishing CG sequences that explicitly entertain the total destruction of mankind. This being a James Cameron film, The Abyss does not have just one finale. Firstly, we have a tense submarine (!) chase that resolves with the estranged Brigmans trapped in a flooded, sparking, submersible. Then a dilemma: with one oxygen mask and tank between them, the decision is made - by Lindsey - to allow herself to drown while Bud tows her body back to the remains of the Deep Core. Harris screams and slaps his way through a seemingly hopeless resuscitation sequence, the actor appearing to purge himself of the nervous breakdown-level exasperations associated with shooting a special effects film while genuinely submerged in stinging water. Everything that follows Lindsey's resurrection feels like a winding, superfluous comedown by comparison. The scale of potential destruction may have increased massively - as well as having a sunken nuclear warhead in play, this Special extended Edition ratchets up the Cold War tensions and introduces the threat of multiple mile-high tidal waves - but the claustrophobic terror we intruded upon earlier has been settled and, to a degree, dispelled. Lindsey and Bud have already reconciled.