For more than twenty years, maybe closer to thirty, I had to settle for the truncated 1989 soundtrack album released by Varese Sarabande for what remains my all-time favorite James Cameron movie, The Abyss.

That changed when Varese Sarabande released this two-disc Deluxe Edition. It contains the film’s entire score, which clocks an impressive, and almost feature-length, running time of one hour and twenty-nine minutes. Cameron himself, for the original album’s liner notes, described Silvestri’s music as “explosive, delicate, intensely emotional, wondrously expansive, mysterious, fiercely driving, tender, and ecclesiastical.”

That is not hyperbole. It is accurate. Silvestri’s compositions for The Abyss are explosive, delicate, emotional, expansive, mysterious, driving, tender, and ecclesiastical.

The presentation here is the composer’s original and, I am assuming, preferred order. Which means some different sequencing and, in a few instances, longer tracks that feature unused music.

Listening to this over the years only made me crave a high definition upgrade of the film itself. Something that finally happened this year. I could not be happier…