Sanctum

I'm not a difficult man to please.  I don't go into movies with ridiculously high standards, demanding that every single film I see be an amazing completely unrepeatable work of art.  Don't get me wrong, when movies are true masterpieces, I'm filled with wonder at the glory of creation like everybody else.  But still, really all your movie needs is to is be entertaining, fun, and have a decent premise to get me fired up and make me happy.  Just try to be original, don't insult my intelligence, and keep it entertaining and your movie will pass.  Maybe this standard is too high.  Ultimately every year I only think about two dozen of the hundreds of movies made are any good.  But I don't think I'm being unreasonable.

"Sanctum" was a movie I had hope for.  It has a really good premise:  scuba divers exploring an unexplored underwater cave get trapped.  Left to die, they must somehow wander out of the cave weathering total darkness, low supplies, and one of the most dangerous environments known to man.  Just add monster catfish people and it could be the greatest movie ever made!  Its like "The Descent" only made worse:  because now the cave is underwater.  One false move and you're drowned.  Even without catfish people (which sadly this movie lacks*) it has a really good opening idea.  A nice survival adventure in the most extreme circumstances imaginable barring crashing into the Sun.  To make an idea this good totally fail, you'd need one of the worst scripts ever written, a cast of awful unlikable morons, and a main character that looks and acts like Tidus from "Final Fantasy X".

And guess what?  It has all those things.  Just about every character in this movie is an idiot, and they all have the disaster that befalls them coming.  It didn't take me long before I decided "screw these human stupids, I'm rooting for the cave".  If the point of this movie is man vs. nature, then nature is a far more sympathetic character and more likable than any person here.  Usually only romantic comedies make me wish the whole cast dead.  "Sanctum" is ground-breaking in at least that respect.

James Cameron's name is all over this project.  He didn't actually make this movie, he just produced it and took all the credit, kinda like M. Night Shyamalan did with last year's "Devil".  "Sanctum" in fact seems to be some kind of weird experiment in creating 3D movies similar to "Avatar".  The poor filmmakers here probably had no idea that James Cameron was using them in his eccentric tinkering.  If Cameron did direct it though, I'd imagine that the characters wouldn't all be so uniformly insufferable and deserving of death.  I mean, I don't think James Cameron is God's Gift to the Camera, but the guy is at least competent in storytelling (when he's not telling some bullshit hippy White-guilt story, of course).  The 3D effects do greatly improve  "Sanctum" though, turning a mediocre movie into a mediocre but pretty movie.  I particularly liked how they were able to recreate light glare from sunlight using the 3D technology.  Otherwise it gave the scuba diving sequences some very nice depth and extra tension.  So if you must see "Sanctum" - which I advise you don't - see it in the largest most insane movie theatre you can find.

"Sanctum" opens with the claim "based on a true story".  Yeah right.  The actual "true story" this based on is that one of the screenwriters once actually got trapped in an underwater cave system.  However, in the real story nobody died and events were probably half as dramatic as they were here.  In "Sanctum" people drop like flies, with a person dying at a rate of approximately one life lost every ten minutes.  If we're going to just make things up already, why not add monster catfish people?  Or a shark - just one shark to eat somebody.  These stupid characters would be great shark food.

I've been complaining about the cast for awhile, so let me actually tell you why they're all so awful.  In "Sanctum" a group of pioneering cave explorers are mapping out a new cave system in New Guinea while being funded by that guy who played Mr. Fantastic from "Fantastic Four"**.  Reeve Richards brings his hot girlfriend who he met on Mt. Everest.  Unfortunately everybody in the cave hates each other.  The main character, Josh, a sniveling little brat whining even more forcefully than Chris O'Donnell in "Batman and Robin" hates his dad, Frank.  Frank, a hard-core cave diver who seems like the only competent man in the group, hates Mr. Fantastic.  Mr. Fantastic's hot girlfriend has never even scuba dived once before, and there's a storm coming in that will flood the entire cave system.  So while everybody is yelling at each other, they all have to stop and notice that the water is now suddenly up to their knees.  Even so, the characters are all so bad at their jobs, one woman manages to get herself killed before the first raindrop falls.  So now Josh starts bitching his dad up something fierce "This all your fault!", "Nobody cares about cave diving, anyway", "Its always Batman and Robin, never Robin and Batman!"  (Screenwriters, here's a tip:  if you want your main character to be sympathetic, don't have him spend the first forty minutes of the movie complaining like a thirteen year old girl who doesn't want to go to Hebrew School.)  Naturally Josh, being by far the worst character, is the only one to survive.  Everybody else in this movie is cannon fodder.

Things naturally go from bad to worse.  Frank, being the only character with any sense, goes ahead and takes charge, causing every character to whine at him.  I wish Frank would just leave them all to die.  The stupidity piles up fast as Mrs. Fantastic decides she doesn't want a wetsuit so she can almost freeze to death, one guy gets the bends and doesn't tell anybody so he can die pointlessly alone while wasting precious flashlights, and Josh will not shut up.  "I want a car, chicks dig the car!"  "You're only mad that Poison Ivy loves me, not you!"  My God...  Then, in one of the most hilarious bits, Mr. Fantastic's girlfriend gets her hair caught in a climbing rope - something I'd think an Everest-quality mountaineer would know how to avoid - and then cuts the rope to get her hair free, and predictably falls to her death.  Well done.  I actually was surprised here, since I assumed that Josh, the Designated Hero thanks to contrivances of the plot, would get the girl - they were giving each other some looks at the beginning.  Oh well.  Anyway her death turns Reeve Richards into an unbelievable asshole, and he goes out of his way to make sure nobody is getting back alive.  See why I'm rooting for the cave now?

As I mentioned before, the cave is the star of the show.  Its an amazing piece of natural wonder, filled with its own claustrophobia and dangers.  Even the entrance to the cave is awesome:  its giant football field-wide crater that goes a mile deep and looks like its been zapped into the Earth from outer space.  There are tunnels underwater so thin you can barely squeeze through, all this with an oxygen tank that's slowly emptying.  Panic and you die.  Make a wrong turn and you're probably going to die.  There's no light, there's no life, there's only cave, and it wants you dead.  Then there's one particularly beautiful moment where they see a Japanese WWII tank that's fallen into the cave system.  New Guinea is a beautiful land, and I'm glad to see her immune system is working its hardest to get these stupid White parasites out of her body.  Be free New Guinea, be free.

In the end Josh barely survives thanks entirely to his own perseverance or some bullshit.  "127 Hours" had a similar moment when James Franco finally pulled himself (well, most of himself) free from the rock, leading to an amazing uplifting triumph of the human spirit.  Why don't feel that way at the end of this movie?  At "Sanctum"'s end, I just want Josh to get eaten by a monster catfish.  I wanted the hero to fail, or otherwise be maimed forever.  Maybe the New Guineans he runs into at the end will sacrifice him to their gods.  At that point, you cannot deny that "Sanctum" has failed as a movie.  Pretty cave, good concept, all wasted by a horrible script and bad characters.  Tidus sucked badly enough the first time I met him, he's just as bad here.

Maybe next time I'll finally get my catfish people movie.  One can only hope.

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* "Sanctum" is the second movie recently that has been made noticeably worse thanks to the lack of monster catfish people.  The other being a movie simply titled "Catfish", a movie probably infamous thanks to it having the biggest bullshit trailer in the history of all cinema.  When you name your movie after an animal, it is well-known that it has feature a monstrous killer form of that animal:  "Piranha" for example.  "Catfish" does not have a single catfish in it, monstrous or otherwise.  How dare they make this crap look like a horror film?  I'll spoil it now:  turns out the girl is actually her mom.  Yeah, big crazy twist.  No monster, no catfish people, no serial killer, nothing remotely interesting at all.  Whatever.  Fuck you, "Catfish".  Somebody should cut out the last forty minutes of that movie and splice in the ending of "Frankenfish".

** On the other hand, I could take solace in the fact that I am not watching "Fantastic Four" right now.  Thank God for that.