Sanctum

Sanctum is a film that's being put forth as if it were directed by James Cameron. It is not, and because of this Cameron will probably suffer. For, he's putting forth a forgettable and trashy film under his name and in the 3D that he religiously advocated for. This might just put the nail in the coffin of 3D, or at least start us down the road that will lead to its death. For, Sanctum is a film where a group of people get stuck in the last unexplored cave on Earth. Pretty much the entire film takes place in the cave...where it's dark. Thus, and already dark film is made into an ultra-dark film by the ridiculous 3D glasses. The 3D is actually so bad and so badly used in Sanctum that about half way through, they gave up on it, and I noticed little difference when I took the glasses off near the end of the film. Actually, it was a lot brighter and easier to see what was going on with the glasses off. That's the key thing wrong with Sanctum. It's hard to follow. The 3D makes it hard to see what's going on and the atrocious editing of the film makes it impossible to tell. Add idiotic dialogue that's employed by macho cave climbers and you get an incomprehensible film. There are admittedly some satisfying scenes near the end, but Sanctum also suffers from the disaster-movie-syndrome. The disaster-movie-syndrome means that one person (or maybe two if we're lucky!) will survive. One person will be an asshole, there will be father-son problems, and the ethnic character will die first. Pretty much all of this is true of Sanctum! It's sort of sadistic the way it unfolds, and by the end, we don't really care who survives. It's like a shock picture! Except that I wasn't shocked and that it was hard to tell what was going on, so I was shocked ten minutes later when I realized what had happened earlier. Sanctum is schlock.
Sanctum: ✰✰