Now THIS is interesting. According to various insider reports and seemingly confirmed by Bill Hunt over at The Digital Bits, the UK release of James Cameron’s The Abyss on 4K UHD discs has been canceled. Why? One single reason. There is a scene in which a pet rat is submerged in a fluid that actually allows the animal to breathe underwater. It’s a thing that’s actually being worked on by scientists. But nope, censors in the UK felt that this scene depicted animal abuse and demanded that the scene be cut. Disney wanted to comply, but James Cameron and his production company, Lightstorm Entertainment weren’t having it. So, Cameron told the UK censors, “fuck you” and canceled the release. And you want to know something? He’s right. That particular scene is not animal abuse. It is a demonstration of the fluid that Ed Harris’ character would end up using towards the end of the movie. James Cameron has always been on the cutting edge of science and technology for his movies, and this underwater breathing mechanism was one of those aspects. The UK censors are spineless imbeciles.
Look, the censors in the UK are very sensitive when it comes to certain subject matter in movies. The whole “Video Nasties” thing during the late 70s and 80s is a prime example of that overreaction. The more they tried to censor or ban those movies, the more people were interested in seeing them. Far be it for me to tell another country how to do things, but censorship is backwards thinking and shortsightedness at its worst. Would the removal of that scene actually impact the rest of the movie? Probably not, but that’s not the issue that we’re dealing with here. What we are dealing with is artistic integrity. By forcing the removal of one scene, you are essentially compromising an artist’s vision for the film, even if it only lasts a couple of minutes. A couple of minutes can make all the difference in the world of film-making. James Cameron was not going to stand for somebody messing with his movies unless he himself decided that there was some way in which his movies could be improved. This situation is censorship, pure and simple, and James Cameron is well within his rights to refuse to sell his movies in a country that would alter his vision. This is one of the issues with the UK government that a lot of people don’t like.
The solution to this problem is obvious: Import the 4k disc of the movie. 4K discs are region-free, so people shouldn’t have any issues playing the movie on their 4K players. All the censors had to do was suck it up, but nope, they’re going to deprive the UK people of a physical 4K copy of The Abyss. Now, consumers in the UK are going to have to shell out extra money to import the film. It’s ridiculous. I hope people over there a launching complaints about this.