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Aggrieved Son has a chip on his shoulder about Robo-Dad dragging him all his life from cave to cave without ever asking if he liked caves. Robo-Dad is not real understanding about Aggrieved’s issues. Robo-Dad is like the former drill sergeant turned therapist in the GEICO commercial: “That’s interesting. You know what makes me sad? You do! Maybe we should chug on over to mamby-pamby land where maybe we can find some self-confidence for you, ya jack-wagon!”
Here is Hardass’s touching speech immediately after a particularly horrifying death: “She made her own choices. She came down here without experience. She [made other mistakes]. That’s three mistakes in a place where you can hardly make one.” He says this right in front of the dead woman’s fiancé, whose shaken response—“Have you no decency?”—elicited laughter from the screening audience. My thought was: I thought it was a foregone conclusion 45 minutes ago that Hardass had no decency. How long have you known him?
Character-wise, that’s about it, I guess. There are a number of other warm bodies on the screen, some assigned roles and/or alleged to have personality traits. Maybe I should count Arrogant Thrill-seeking American Millionaire Sponsor (Ioan Gruffudd, Fantastic Four), who for reasons I can’t reconstruct in my mind begins the movie irritated at Hardass for not having found the underground outlet leading to the ocean yet, as a character. Hm. Nah. (Hardass’s response reminds me of Belloq in Raiders: “I promised nossing! Spelunking is not an exact science!”)
At some point Hardass takes a stab* at explaining to Aggrieved Son why he was such a lame father and husband. It comes out something like this: “I could never be what you needed, or what she needed. Down here, I can make sense of the world. Up there ... CDs and cars and mortgages ... I was lost. This is my church.” So add, what, abandonment and/or divorce to euthanasia and suicide on the movie’s Culture of Death Rationalization Checklist. And really bad dialogue.
This might sound like a line from a movie review on The Onion, but: I would have thought “executive produced by James Cameron” meant something. For all that might be said, and truly said, about Cameron’s limitations as a filmmaker, and the morally problematic milieux of most of his films, the man is focused like a laser beam on entertaining his target audience, which is a big chunk of everybody. Sanctum brutalizes the audience and gives almost nothing in return. I am so not surprised to read in Roger Ebert’s review, “Here is a movie that can only harm the reputations of Cameron and 3-D itself.”
I went to see Sanctum in part because of the allure of caves, and the film does deliver some pretty scenery. Occasionally the 3-D is even an asset. If, over my objections, you decide to see Sanctum, ask yourself while you are watching a young woman caught by her hair until her scalp starts to peel away from her skull if it’s worth it.
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I am now literally shaking at my keyboard because I was considering watching this (what I now understand to be) wretched film today, but I fortunately chose “The Fighter” over it.
Unfortunately, a registered nurse whom I work with will be watching this film tomorrow with her 11 and 5 year old sons. I have no way of contacting them. If only I’d read a review like this a few days earlier.
God help them!
@Benchwarmer: Your RN friend would being her 5-year-old and 11-year-old to an R-rated movie? Without even checking up on the content? Hopefully not. Hopefully she’ll figure it out for herself. If not, hopefully she’ll learn a valuable lesson.
Parents who expose their kids willy-nilly to inappropriate content are a pet peeve of mine. I’m reminded of my friend and fellow critic Lawrence Toppman’s “Open Letter to a Mother at an R-rated Movie.”
Wow! It’s been AGES since any movie has gotten an “F / -3” on the DF moralometer, and I have to say I’ve missed watching you unload with both barrels like this (though that is NOT a call to Hollywood to make more morally reprehensible and thoroughly crappy movies). From the previews, this actually looked good and uplifting, with tons of great IMAX 3-D shots. Thanks for saving me from spending any money or time on this spelunkture porn.
Why would anybody that calls themselves a Christian even waste there time going to a R rated movie?
@Edith Berry: On seeing R-rated movies, three timely words: The King’s Speech. Now in theaters. See it. I practically guarantee you won’t be sorry, no matter how strict your standards are for these things.
@Victor: That’s because usually movies in the F range don’t reach the interest threshold needed to get me to the screening—and those I do see don’t usually rise to the threshold of needing to be reviewed.
Sanctum got me to the screening by a) coming along at the beginning of February when there was nothing else to see, b) being executive produced by James Cameron (I wasn’t kidding about that), and c) the underwater cave hook. Then, because I figured that a significant number of my readers might make the same mistake, its culture-of-death milieu got me to the threshold of actually writing it up.
Well - great stuff. I am very happy that the characters are not compelling in any way. It would be a bigger problem if they were compelling…
The heartless, soul-less people you describe in the film may not be identifiable with the survivors of the real story behind the movie, but Cameron may have been thinking of the steady stream of “survivor” types who for hours on the trek toward Mt. Everest’s summit a few years ago passed without aiding a collapsed-and-barely-breathing climber around 20,000 feet up. The attitude seemed to be, “Survival of the fittest rules here; I’m not giving up MY chance at the summit for this loser.” Thankfully, after several hours, one group (Australian, I think) DID stop, forfeit their chance at the summit, and help the distressed climber back to a base camp and medical aid.
Edith asked, “Why would anybody that calls themselves a Christian even waste there time going to a R rated movie?”
Although most are not, a few R pictures can be worthwhile. A few.
_The Passion of the Christ_ had an MPAA rating of R.
“I could never be what you needed, or what she needed. Down here, I can make sense of the world. Up there ... CDs and cars and mortgages ... I was lost. This is my church.”
Screenwriter stole it from it The Goonies.
@Paul +100,000,000,000,000!!!!
It’d be interesting to see how much of the other “Sanctum” (“Sanctum? Damn near killed him!”) dialogue was ripped off from “The Goonies” (“Their time! Up there! Down here, it’s our time. It’s our time down here.”)
The Goonies. One of the best. movies. ever.
When you wrote that remark about whether a child shouldn’t know his father better than people spelunking with him, I thought I might comment on the fact that these days, many children (perhaps approaching most) don’t spend much time at all with their parents, let alone quality time.
Then I read that, indeed, the father in this film abandoned him wife and son. Surprise, surprise…
Jon White mentions the events that happened on Everest several years back. I have not seen the movie I think this sounds like an extremely good comparison. If anyone is interested here is a reasonably good explanation of what happens on that mountain http://godheadv.blogspot.com/2010/04/abandoned-on-everest.html (Warning the page contains some disturbing images.) The event mentioned seams to be rather typical.
I would be very interested in knowing Steven D. Greydanus thoughts after reading git.
Thanks for the review.
Jack Perry: If a child grows up without significant contact with his parents, then that is a highly significant form of experience about his parents, is what I’m saying. :)
Michael Buckley: I’m out of pocket at the moment. I’ll be back on Monday.
The last word of my last post should be ‘it’, referring to the link… I should really proof read stuff better :(
Paul and Victor have put quite an image into my head: a Goonies in which Mikey is in pursuit of the thrill of the chase, not saving his subdivision, and all of the supporting characters systematically die off as Mikey leaves them behind in his ruthless pursuit of One-eyed Willy (all while puffing on his inhaler).
It would be interesting to know just how much of this film actually had any input from Cameron. The helicopter-over-a-lush-jungle footage obviously brought Avatar to mind, and the fact that the ROV was named “Virgil” reminded me that the Ed Harris character in The Abyss (which also featured drownings, compression chambers and a significant-to-the-plot ROV of its own) was also named Virgil.
Given how grim the situation is, and how a lot of these characters die, I also couldn’t help wondering if that vast chamber discovered early on was named “St. Jude’s Cathedral” partly because St. Jude is the patron saint of lost causes. (Within the film, the chamber is named after an actual character named Jude, but that just begs the question of why the filmmakers gave that name to that character in the first place.)
@ Peter T Chattaway: Good point about St. Jude. Given that writer/producer Andrew Wight has worked with Cameron for a decade, it’s possible that Wight’s own work bears a Cameron stamp even without Cameron’s direct involvement. It does seem that Cameron selected director Alister Grierson to make the first feature after Avatar with his features, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he were involved in other ways—though that only makes the utterly un-Cameronesque lack of relatable characters and etertainment value more incomprehensible.
@ Michael Buckley: Back now from a weekend jaunt to the Adirondacks with my boys. Shooting .22s in heavy snowfall—and driving home in heavy hail—quite an experience!
I looked over the link you sent, and I’m certainly familiar with a lot of the Everest lore it details. If anything, the real-world story of the man at Green Boots cave “abandoned on Everest”—which the blog post notes has “entered the folklore” of Everest and of mountain climbing generally—highlights the atrocity of Sanctum‘s tale of mercy drowning and self-inflicted abandonment.
David Sharp was on Everest alone. He was a stranger to the climbers who walked past his frostbitten body. No one stopped on the way up to try to help him, but equally no one slit his throat or put a bullet in his brainpan. A number of climbers did stop to try to help, though only on the way down, when their achievement was no longer in jeopardy. Many thought he was dead already; some even mistook him for Green Boots, the well-known corpse of a climber who died in 1996 whose body has become a landmark on the climb, next to which Sharp died.
The prospect of hikers walking past a dying stranger may be chilling, but Sanctum conjures up a scenario that is orders of magnitudes worse, in which multiple severely injured team members are deliberately put to death by their own companions—including (spoiler alert) a father put to death by his own son.)
The article you linked to notes that at high altitude the lack of oxygen can affect one’s judgment. It’s worth noting that so can having the bends. Had Sanctum made any attempt to suggest that the team member who deliberately fell behind and crawled into a hole to die so as not to be a drag on his team members may have been acting erratically and irrationally, I would be more forgiving of the film—but it doesn’t. This is not a movie with any interest in questioning or casting doubts on the rationality and correctness of actively embracing death—other people’s or our own—either because death is preferable to dying, or for the sake of a supposed common good.
LOL @ John M. :D
It’s interesting to note that Mike Ryan at Movieline (who hated the movie) said the key to “enjoying” this flick is to interpret it as a serial killer movie. That’s the issue: when a survival movie plays more like a serial killer movie, you’ve got problems.
Doesn’t sound like a survival movie at all. More like an “everyone dies” movie. And it’s awful HOW it was done in this film, but the fact that it was done at all is the real problem. People often say that you have to kill off characters in order to keep the tension up. If anyone can die, the theory goes, then the audience won’t be able to assume that the main cast can’t get hurt, the danger will feel more real, and the audience will be more emotionally invested. And this works, up to a point.
But before long, you reach a point when it becomes cheap. The storyteller is just killing off characters for shock value. And not far past that point is the point where I stop caring. Why in the world should I invest myself in these characters when, in all likelihood, they’ll all be dead within an hour?
And heaven forbid we become so desensitized by such “entertainment” that we start to feel the same way about REAL people.
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