Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) mène une vie heureuse et tranquille avec son épouse (Maria Bello) et leurs deux enfants dans la petite ville de Millbrook, Indiana. Mais son existence idyllique prend brutalement fin quand, au cours d'une tentative de vol à son restaurant, il tue en légitime défense deux criminels, sauvant du coup clients et amis. Acclamé comme un héros, Tom ne souhaite que reprendre sa vie normale, mais son apparition dans les médias attire l'attention d'un homme aussi mystérieux que menaçant (Ed Harris), qui affirme que Tom n'est pas celui qu'il prétend être.
La vie de Karen McCann bascule le jour où sa fille Julie est violée puis tuée. L'assassin, Robert Doob, est libéré après l'obtention d'un non-lieu par son avocate. Revoltée, Karen s'initie au maniement des armes et suit Doob à la trace...
Meticulously crafted but also ponderous and predictable, James Cameron's 1989 deep-sea close-encounter epic reaffirms one of the oldest first principles of cinema: everything moves a lot more slowly underwater. Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, as formerly married petroleum engineers who still have some issues to work out, are drafted to assist a gung-ho Navy SEAL (Michael Biehn) with a top-secret recovery operation: a nuclear sub has been ambushed and sunk, under mysterious circumstances, in some of the deepest waters on earth, and the petro-techies have the only submersible craft capable of diving down that far. Every image and every performance is painstakingly sharp and detailed (and the computerized water creatures are lovely) but the movie's lumbering pace is ultimately lethal. It's the audience that ends up feeling waterlogged. For a guy who likes guns as much as Cameron (his next film after all, was the body-count masterpiece Terminator 2: Judgment Day), it's interesting that the moral balance here is weighted heavily in favor of the can-do engineers; the military types are end-justifies-the-means amoralists, just like the weasely government bureaucrats in Aliens. --David Chute --This text refers to the VHS Tape edition.