I’m not going to make a habit of posting reviews, I think, but I just watched a movie that I thought it’d be worth talking about a bit. It’s Neil Marshall’s The Descent, a British horror movie that’s been talked about and hyped quite a lot. Neil Marshall made Dog Soldiers in 2002, a movie I liked quite a bit. Dog Soldiers was a fairly basic, but solid and tense horror/action deal, using werewolves as monsters in a “group of soldiers isolated and fighting against overwhelming odds” story along the lines of Aliens and Zulu. I know people who hated it, but I thought it worked well, and was a good example of what could be done with a tight script and a small budget.

I had fairly high expectations about The Descent, since it seemed like a good concept, a group of female cavers get trapped in an uncharted cave system and are hunted by strange predators. There’s a huge list of phobias to exploit here, from fear of the dark, claustrophobia, fear of heights, etc., to the more mythological fears of monsters living on the bowels of the earth, places we never see, Lovecraft’s “Dark corners of the earth”.

I watched this with Øyvind, who’s a bit of a caver himself, and knows a bunch of people who basically dedicate their lives to it. As I expected, there were things in the movie that were unrealistic from a caver’s point of view, but maybe not as much as I had feared. The cavers in the movie wear too little clothing, they act foolishly at times, and one of the main turning points is sadly unrealistic, but apart from that, it’s not too bad.

What really doesn’t work is very simply the script. Characters lack motivation for the things they do, especially the Sarah character at the end is acting totally irrationally, and quite cruelly. Although that specific incident can be explained by her mental state, it totally robs us of any sympathy for the character, and we simply don’t care much if she lives or dies. The plot is extremely simple, and the characterization scenes in the first act, that are supposed to build the characters and make us care about them, are unfocused and generally fail completely.

The characters are hard to tell apart, with the exception of Sarah, since she’s surly and depressed, Juno, since she’s Asian and good looking, and Holly, since she’s, god help me, punk rock or something. It gets better once some of the characters are knocked off, as they always are in movies like these, and when they get split up, Marshall sees fit to give them different color lights, so it’s easier to know who we’re looking at. But still, it seems like a defeat to have to color-code your characters for your audience to be able to tell them apart.

The main problem is simple. We don’t really know much about these people, we don’t care too much about them, when they die, we’re not sure who died, and by the time the ending rolls around, we’re tired of it all.

There are some visually and stylistically nice touches in this movie, though. There’s a car crash in the first act that is very naturalistic and comes on in an unexpected way, but still manages to maintain the horror movie standard gore. Right after that, there’s a “lights go out sequentially in a corridor” scene which is also nice looking, even though we’ve seen that in The Matrix Reloaded already (in the trailer, even). Some of the monster effects are nice, they’re shot in that strobed fast exposure look that worked so well for 28 Days Later, making their movements all chaotic and hard to follow, and also freeze-framing arcs of brilliant crimson drops of blood in the air. Also, the required claustrophobia works fairly well, although Øyvind was slightly dismissive, he seemed to think that the tightest corridors people in the movie squeezed through were quite roomy and comfortable compared to some he’d seen.

In summary, it’s decent, but it’s it’s not good enough. It’s interesting to see that some of the user comments on IMDB are praising it for being a break from “the usual Hollywood fare”, when it’s actually an incredibly typical horror plot, and it also derives most of its scares (or rather, jumps) from monsters popping up after 20 seconds of characters looking around in the dark while the creepy music builds. It’ll make you jump, and it’s tense at times, but it’s not particularly scary. I’m convinced there are much better movies that can be made about horrors that lurk in the dark, forbidden corners of the earth.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 8th, 2005 at 8:04 pm and is filed under Horror, Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.