Everyone loves a little bit of adventure, but some people take it to the extreme, whether climbing Everest or exploring the wonders of deep-sea diving. The hardy band of explorers in the new thriller “Sanctum” are crazy enough to engage in both at the same time, by tunneling and swimming their way through the largest cave ever discovered – a gaping hole that burrows at least two miles down below the earth’s surface.
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They’re funded by a billionaire industrialist (Ioan Gruffudd) named Carl, who’s willing to spend his vast fortune for bragging rights on being the first to explore the earth’s last frontier, and the stubborn old codger named Paul (Richard Roxburgh) who’s calling the shots and leading everyone through ever-greater risks is supposed to be the world’s greatest cave explorer.
But what if man simply isn’t meant to mess with something that vast and unknown?
That’s the harrowing twist that kicks “Sanctum” – an Australian movie that is now being brought to American screens through the endorsement of its executive producer James Cameron and bears the most stunning 3D cinematography and effects this side of his landmark “Avatar” – into high gear. Over the course of nearly two intense and grueling two hours, the team of about a dozen explorers winds up battling for survival against floods, falling rocks, tunnels that are too narrow, hypothermia, and the nasty underwater affliction known as “the bends.”
And things get even crazier when they start to turn on each other. It’s that aspect of the film that proves to be its most interesting as well as its most disturbing, causing enough discomfort at even a free preview screening to cause a few people to bail out early.
The problem is that by halfway through the movie, so much has gone wrong for our heroes that a sense of dread starts to overwhelm any sense of enjoyment. The film has three – count them, three – scenes in which members of the team feel compelled to mercy kill each other, while a fourth lovable character contracts “the bends” and opts to drown himself so the others can move on quickly.
The film is written by John Garvin and Andrew Wight, and is based on a cave expedition Wight went on in which his 14-person team became trapped for two days. Judging by the myriad awful ways in which his characters die, one can only imagine that the participants really did wind up hating each other.
But when a movie features a major character undergoing a seismic moral shift from being mortified by mercy killing to engaging in one himself amid emotion-wringing music and slow motion imagery, one has to wonder if the filmmakers aren’t trying to sell a pro-euthanasia agenda even more than they are selling us entertainment. I don’t mean to sound like a paranoid moralist, but Hollywood – and all forms of storytelling – have long used fictional elements to affect viewers’ thinking and social norms, for good and for bad.
Ultimately, it’s a shame that “Sanctum” drives home such an unsettling theme, because it otherwise would have plenty to offer viewers. Being filmed on a budget of $30 million meant that director Alister Grierson had to rely on stunning natural locations, and the stuntwork throughout is superb even as it’s largely in the service of a nihilistic viewpoint.
The fact that its cast is composed of Australian actors who are largely unknown to American audiences makes it all the more easy to regard them as real people with unpredictable behavior, and adds to the horrible sense that one never knows who’s going to get sick, go crazy, or turn on others next. It also makes viewers more easily question how they would handle the same awful decisions of life and death.
If only “Sanctum” didn’t forcefeed us such grim and hopeless answers.
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