I wouldn't recommend watching the Theatrical Cut of The Abyss. It's a decent film but the ending is so butchered that it has you wondering what the hell happened. It just doesn't make any sense.

However, the ending to the Special Edition isn't perfect either. It clears things up, it tells you why there are these florescent aliens swimming about, but in the extended edition they're less likable - in the original cut Bud (Ed Harris) disarms a nuclear warhead, is saved by aliens and then meets them for about two seconds before being taken back to the surface; it's nonsensical but at least the aliens seem helpful and friendly. In the Special Edition, though, you see that these aliens are on the brink of destroying the world. They can control the waves so they're going to flood everything. And when Bud asks why they're going to do this, they show lots of shots of nuclear bombs going off on some watery video screen. Here they seem a bit preachy and just a little bit psychotic. But then inspired by Bud's love for his wife, they change their mind and the waves dissipate. The aquatic nutballs realise that we're not all bad and that there's no need for watery genocide. Suddenly they're a bunch of extraterrestrial hippies.

But although the message of the Special Edition is pap in the extreme (war is bad, okay? Why can't we all just get along?), it's at least an acceptable resolution. You're not left scratching your head.

But the aliens are perhaps one of the least satisfactory aspects of the film. In parts the film becomes Close Encounters underwater, yet the wide-eyed wonder is just a little bit cornier than it should be. Much more successful is the Cold War paranoia and the working class banter amongst the characters. Cameron is no Spielberg.

For me, the most enjoyable parts of the film are those dealing with Coffey (Michael Biehn). He's a Navy Seal who has to hitch a ride on Bud's underwater drilling platform to locate a sunken nuclear sub. At the beginning his mission is just to look for survivors, but when the aliens show up he thinks they're Russians. Cue psychosis.

The progression from normality to lunacy isn't exactly handled with subtlety (Coffey goes mad almost instantly; a reaction to being so deep underwater), but it's fun. One of my favourite bits is when the divers are talking and Coffey is discretely cutting his arm under the table. Mental just doesn't describe him adequately. And I also like it when the divers confront him after he brings a nuclear warhead onto the rig. He says something about them doing an 'about-face', but Biehn delivers the line superbly; he hisses it like a snake. And then once they leave, you see that he's been holding a gun behind his back all the time. Again he's just completely lost the plot. But what makes him such a good character is that he doesn't think he's mad. He thinks what he's doing is for everyone's good; he thinks there are commies down there. So as dangerous and crazy as he is, he ends up being something of a pathetic figure. Indeed, even his death isn't cause for celebration. After an excellent submarine chase he falls down into the abyss and dies when the sub cracks under the pressure. Soldier boy just couldn't take the strain.

But although Coffey is the most fun character (if fun is the correct word), Ed Harris is the person who makes the film work. You can feed him the corniest lines and he'll somehow make them seem genuine. And he'll give them a ring of truth because he's so damn intense. Just take the resuscitation scene. It's silly in the extreme. Bud's wife drowns after the chase with Coffey and Bud then takes her back to the rig. He then resuscitates her. It really shouldn't work, and we've seen so many resuscitation scenes that they're clichéd beyond belief, but Harris jumps into the scene with such vigour that it ends up being one of the best scenes in the film. He gives CPR like a madman and yells "Fight!" at the top of his lungs before slapping his wife across the face. It's pretty hardcore. And then when his wife wakes up (after an interminable length of time), a shaking of the head, which would be the normal reaction, is replaced by a goofy grin.

And credit also has to go to Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as Bud's wife Lindsey. She gives an excellent performance and she joins Ripley and Sarah Connor as female characters that are genuinely tough. These days there are tons of annoying lipstick heroines that are supposed to be 'empowered' – women who can fire over-sized guns and 'kick ass'. But they're usually anorexic models with balloon tits; they're about as tough as a glass of water. But Cameron has a habit of creating genuinely tough female characters, ones that feel like the real deal.

However, as good as Harris, Biehn and Mastrantonio are, the rest of the cast are far from stellar. In fact, some of the acting is downright dire. But it's weird, although there's some cringeworthy "Oh my god!" moments, and although there's some unconvincing crying and some bad line delivery, there's genuine chemistry between the actors which makes up for some of the shortcomings when it comes to craft.

But to be fair, the bad acting isn't limited to the supporting cast. Mastrantonio suffers in the scene where she has to talk to Bud as he's journeying down the abyss to disarm the nuke. But then again, the script doesn't help her much. She has to talk some nonsense about candles. However, that's Cameron for you. He's a master at action but an amateur at emotions. Just watch Titanic for another lesson.

My main problem with the film adaptation of Atonement, like the novel, is the ending. Here we have a character, Briony Tallis, who as a thirteen-year-old girl splits up a young couple and sends a young man, Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), to jail by falsifying evidence. Years later she realises what she did was wrong and tries to atone for her mistakes. But the way that she tries to do it seems wrong to me.

You see, Briony is a writer, and as a precocious thirteen-year-old girl she attempts to put on a play called The Trials of Arabella. Full of self-importance it promises to be a ridiculous piece. But then as a successful writer, and diagnosed with a terminal disease, she writes a novel about her experiences – about the way she destroyed a burgeoning love affair. She claims it’s entirely autobiographical. And before this we have a powerful scene where an eighteen-year-old Briony, now a nurse in the Second World War, confronts the couple she attempted to split up (the woman in the relationship, played by Keira Knightley, is her sister). Full of anger and regret, it shows how Briony is trying to make things up. She wants to right the wrongs she made.

But then as the older Briony talks at the end, we find out, even though she said the entire book was autobiographical, that this scene is a fiction. Briony never really met her sister during the war. She never met Robbie. Indeed, Robbie never even made it back from Dunkirk. He died of septicaemia. And Cecilia (Knightley) died in an Underground station during the Blitz. What kind of atonement is this? It’s meant to be some kind of offering to the world, to show how glorious their love could be. And it’s also meant to be a way of immortalising their love, to allow them to live on. But personally, I think it suggests that Briony hasn’t learnt a single thing. She’s still the silly little girl living in her dream world. She still can’t accept reality. In fact, the old Briony explains her reasons for not including the actual events by saying it wouldn’t be satisfactory for her readers. Well, maybe it wouldn’t, but at least, for once, it would be the truth – a novel concept for the rather wretched Briony Tallis.

Aside from this, though, I enjoyed the film. And I even have to say that the ending moved me somewhat. But it didn’t move me because of Briony’s ‘atonement’. It moved me because Robbie and Cecilia’s love was never fulfilled. There’s something touching about the banality of Robbie’s death, that such a strong will to survive and that such a determined desire to return home can be extinguished so easily.

Another moving scene is the one where an eighteen-year-old Briony has to comfort a dying French soldier. I can remember it being the most powerful scene in the novel, and it’s equally powerful here. I think it’s the first time that Briony ever realises what love really is, that it isn’t a selfish need to possess another human being (her betrayal of Robbie is entirely motivated by feelings of rejection) but a simple desire to make another person happy. Therefore, when she talks to this dying soldier, a man who’s delirious and who seems to think that he knows her from the past, you get a proper sense that she’s atoning for her mistakes. I really think it’s near impossible for her to untangle the mess she made with Robbie and Cecilia, but the simple way she says ‘Yes’ when the young soldier asks her whether she loves him is so sweet and kind and unselfish that you feel that she’s finally beginning to act selflessly.

However, my favourite scene in the film occurs when Robbie enters Dunkirk. There’s a wonderfully cinematic sequence where the camera floats through the beach and into the town. Around you soldiers lie down to sleep, others fight and some even congregate to sing. And then in the background you have drunk soldiers staggering about and others destroying machinery and vehicles so that the Germans can’t use them. It’s done in such a simple, elegant way. Plus it economically communicates the despair and desperation of the situation. These men can almost see home – they can almost see it on the horizon – but it still seems so far away.

It’s curious, though, that while, in the novel, I wasn’t particularly inspired by the Dunkirk sequence, I loved the opening. But in the film I feel it’s the weakest section. For me it just didn’t have the claustrophobia, the passion and the intensity it has in the book. But maybe the film was always going to struggle with this section – in writing you can kind of tolerate the young Briony, but brought to life she’s rather wretched and annoying. Plus Keira Knightley is never totally convincing. She doesn’t embarrass herself, but she does lack charm and sex appeal. And she also has a habit of trying too hard – just look at her mouth when she says “come back to me” to Robbie; her lips look almost disfigured, she’s trying so hard to impress. But when she relaxes, she's actually fairly capable. There’s a lovely little moment when she holds Robbie’s hand. There’s no pouting, no exaggeration – just a nice bit of warmth and feeling.

Another thing that counts against the opening sequence is that once or twice it’s unintentionally comic. Fair enough you have the silly twins who are meant to garner a laugh or two, but I’m sure that the dramatic, zoomed-in typing of the word ‘cunt’ wasn’t meant to have people rolling in the aisles. But such was the faux profundity of the moment that it did just that.

But these problems aside, Atonement is a decent adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel. I certainly don’t think it should be involved in the upcoming Oscar race, but it deserves to be kindly remembered.

To call Total Recall an intellectual action film would be going too far. After all, this is a film with a three-titted whore, a midget hooker and a body count only Harold Shipman could dream of. Plus it has Arnie one-liners and tons and tons of blood. But despite all this, buried underneath the sleazy, bloodstained exterior there's a smart film trying to get out. Issues of reality and identity are all dealt with. But they're never dealt with at the expense of someone getting their head blown off.

Watching it back, it's quite pleasing to remember just how violent action films used to be. Here you have men getting spiked in the neck, people getting axed and a man getting a pole of some sort shoved through his face. And that's just in one scene. The violence here is bloody and over the top, and in my opinion, much better for it. I mean, action films these days have become rather sanitised. There's just a feeling that you've seen it all before. But how many times do you get to see a man have his arms ripped off as he dangles from a lift? And how many times do you get to see that and have Arnie toss the arms away while delivering a quip?

And then there's the bit where Michael Ironside shoots the three-titted whore in the back. Beautiful. I mean, this is meant to be a bad, bad man. And what better way to generate loathing (and secret admiration) than have him shoot a mutant hooker while her back is turned.

But one of the most delightful bits of insane violence is when the midget whore stabs Ironside's lackey. You have to ask yourself whether you're shrooming your tits off. But no, it happens and then the midget stands on top of the bar and opens fire with a machine gun. Verhoeven is clearly a twisted man-mental, but I can't help but admire him.

Also worthy of praise is the shootout on the subway. Arnie is fleeing from the bad guys and tries to haul ass up the escalators. But more bad guys appear at the top. As everyone starts shooting, an innocent person gets killed in the crossfire. Arnie then uses the bloke as a human shield – he gets penetrated more times than a pretty boy in a prison shower – and tosses the piece of meat into the path of the bad guys below. I can't help but salute the complete utter lack of sentiment.

I also salute the fight between Arnie and Sharon Stone. I mean, usually fights between women and men in action films are death – yeah, I can believe than an anorexic model can hurt a man double her size – but it at least keeps things relatively believable by having Stone hit Arnie a couple of times in his brain (his testicles). But what makes it a joy is that after the fight, Stone tries to buy some time by offering to tie herself up and let Arnie have his way with her. You know, for old times sake. It's something of a surprise that Der Gropenfuhrer doesn't take her up on her generous offer, but Arnie does knock her out…which is even better.

And there's another bit of violence that cracks me up. The evil mutant Benny, in some sort of digging machine, is attacking Arnie. Arnie then grabs a huge drill and rams it through the side of the vehicle while screaming "Screw you!" at the top of his lungs. It's one of the few bits of possible homoeroticism in a film that is remarkably ungay for an Arnie flick.

But there is another little bit of possible gayness in the film. Just take the relationship between Hauser (Arnie's evil alter-ego) and Cohaagen (Ronny Cox). They hug enthusiastically in a video message and then Cohaagen has a big strop when he finally realises that Hauser isn't coming back – he kicks a tank of goldfish over. It seems like he's lost more than a friend.

But Ronny Cox is excellent in the film. Sure he's basically playing the same character he played in RoboCop, but he always makes an excellent villain. And I love the scene where he's going to have Quaid turned back into Hauser and have Melina 'fixed'. His dialogue with Arnie is wonderful. "You get to fuck her every night, that's right. She's going to be Hauser's babe." And then when asked what to do with all the people that are suffocating because he's cut off the air, he replies, "Fuck 'em." That's a proper movie villain.

However, I don't think the film is in the same class as RoboCop. For one, Total Recall now looks rather dated (look at the 'futuristic' cars) while RoboCop seems pretty timeless, and plus the balance between smarts and action is a bit more even in RoboCop.

But that's not to say that Total Recall is a dumb film. One of the obvious pleasures is trying to work out whether the whole thing is a dream or not. After all, when Quaid goes to Rekall to have his 'ego trip' everything the salesman says in his pitch actually happens – the whole plot is given away in one scene. And then at the end you have a white out rather than a fade to black. This could suggest that Quaid is waking up or even being lobotomised. But although it's something that's pleasing to think about, the film is more concerned about action than ideas. And so that makes the film a minor success rather than an overwhelming success like RoboCop.