The news of the five people aboard a submersible who went missing near the wreck of the Titanic has caused widespread speculation and grabbed media headlines over the world. On Thursday, OceanGate, the company responsible for the ill-fated expedition, announced that the five individuals on board the missing submersible had died. Now, many users reacted to this shocking news and finding similarities with a scene in the 1983 movie directed by James Cameron, in which an American submarine sinks in the Caribbean, a US search and recovery team works with an oil platform crew to recover the boat. (Also read: Tom Cruise says he can do a better Mission: Impossible and Top Gun: Maverick)
Twitter draws parallels to The Abyss
Many users in Twitter have dug up a scene from the Academy Award-winning film The Abyss, where the submarine sinks into the depth of the sea with the character Coffey (Michael Biehn), who falls off the edge of the trough and is crushed within his submersible by the pressure. A user tried to recreate through an animated version as to what might have happened to the submarine. It said, “The U.S. Coast Guard has confirmed the Titan ‘exploded from the inside’ It is likely that a crack caused the ‘catastrophic implosion’ shortly after communication was lost on Sunday. Video recreation of an implosion shows it would have occurred so fast, the passengers would have died instantly without being aware of what was happening.” To this, a user wrote, “Of course, the slowed for dramatic effect cinematic version has been around for quite a while” and attached the scene from The Abyss.
More Twitter reactions
Another user wrote with an edited promo of the film in the tweet, “The movie The Abyss comes to mind with all the ‘sub’ talk. The folks in the dominant societies need for fun, usually will always take a bunch of them out. If you watch this, get the unedited directors cut.” Another user referred to the book The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron by Rebecca Keegan, which described how the underwater sequences in the film The Abyss was called the ‘toughest movie shoot in movie history.’ The tweet read, “There’s a James Cameron movie called The Abyss made before Titanic and Avatar called the toughest shoot in movie history. All the diving sequences were shot for real, underwater. Both he and Ed Harris almost died while making it. As recounted in @ThatRebecca’s book The Futurist”
Earlier speaking on the matter, the Titanic director had expressed his deep concern in an interview with ABC News. “I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice field on a moonless night and many people dies as a result. For us, it’s a very similar tragedy where warnings went unheeded… To take place at the same exact site with all the diving that’s going on all around the world, I think it’s just astonishing. It’s really quite surreal.” he said.