A fun part of my new job is conducting presentation screenings. Most times these screenings are held before the movie opens. The screening is closed to the public and unfortunately I am not allowed to blog about the movie until opening day. But occasionally the presentation screening will coincide with the first public showing of the film and that is how I found myself watching Sanctum in IMAX 3D at 12:01 AM this morning.
Sanctum is a story of a group of cave explorers who can trapped underground and must struggle to find a way out. The film contains some harrowing scenes and some moments of agonizing claustrophobia. It also contains every disaster movie cliche in the book.
The only person who does any real acting is Richard Roxburgh as Frank McGuire, the leader of the group. But sometimes he is given some awful lines to spout, especially when he is trying to resolve his relationship with his son, Josh. The film is filled with people who feel it necessary to resolve relationship issues at moments of extreme terror and life and death.
The group of explorers including Ioan Gruffudd, Alice Parkinson, Rhys Wakefield, Dan Wyllie and Allison Cratchely (all Australians) are exploring a vast cave system in Papa New Guinea. Their base camp is in the main cave 2,000 kilometers below the earth surface. From an early scene we already know how dangerous this activity is and when a predicted tropical storm arrives early and starts a rushing torrent of water pouring into the cave, the group is in grave danger. The rest of the film is one long climb, dive, swim to the surface. There were brief moments when I was reminded of The Poseidon Adventure.
Sanctum is filmed in 3D and in some cases the visual effects work really well but in others the 3D effect is lost, or even worse distracting, taking you out of the story because you notice how artificial it looks. They would have been better off making the film in regular 2D.
Sanctum has about 30m minutes of really good, "edge of your seat" movie in it. Unfortunately it is surrounded by an hour and 10 minutes of not so good stuff.
At The Movie House rating ** stars
1 comment:
I saw another "Cave" movie with a bunch of girls who encounter cannibal monsters down in the caves....It's about 3 years old and it was quite good and frightening...May I suggest you continue the Cave theme wioth a review
Sorry i have not been avaialble to be reviewing the reviews (an esential paqrt of this website) but I have been busy editing old siskal and Ebert Shows
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