In the interest of scientific exploration, I offer a few random dialogue samples from the 3-D cavediveapalooza survival adventure Sanctum: "Life's not a dress rehearsal -- you gotta seize the day!" "The exit! Shit!" "Where's my mask? Goddammit!" "I am not wearing the wetsuit of a dead person!" "You spend your lives wrapped in cotton wool! You want to play at being adventurous? Yeah, this is it!" And last but not least, the ever-popular "We've got to get out of here -- now!"
Sanctum wasn't directed by James Cameron -- he's merely an executive producer -- but the script is pure Cameron gibberooni, the kind of language that would embarrass a '40s comic-strip character if he found it penciled into one of his voice balloons. The supposition, maybe, is that in an alleged thrill ride of a movie like this one, the words aren't supposed to matter. (As they weren't supposed to matter in Cameron's tin-eared but visually massive Avatar.) And it's true that great visuals, or a great story, or deeply unself-conscious acting can be enough to make us look past awkward dialogue. But Sanctum is skimpy on those attributes. And aside from a few tense moments -- and a meager handful of impressive-looking effects -- the picture feels about as alive as a Viewmaster image of a rock formation.
It didn't have to be that way. Sanctum, an early title card informs us, is based on true events, and particularly for claustrophobic types, it offers a few moments of grueling verisimilitude. (The script is by John Garvin and Andrew Wight, the latter of whom really did have to fight his way out of a scary cave situation.) But director Alister Grierson doesn't give the story enough cinematic shape and weight. The movie is paced strangely -- it's not really a story, constructed of satisfying and elastic highs and lows, but a string of endurance tests featuring characters that, even well into the movie's second act, we're not sure we care about.
The hero of this barely-a-story is Josh (Rhys Wakefield), a disaffected blond kid who grumbles when he's invited to tag along with his dad, Frank (Richard Roxburgh), an ace cave explorer who's already well into a serious assignment: He's leading an expedition into Esa Ala, in Papua New Guinea, which, we're told in a bit of helpful exposition, is one of the largest unexplored cave systems in the world. Josh is joining the already-in-progress expedition, accompanied by Frank's boss, Carl (the Welsh actor Ioan Gruffudd, playing a tight-ass American) and Carl's hot new girlfriend, Victoria (Alice Parkinson), who's handy to have around partly for the fact that she wears her tight adventure-babe jerseys zipped down to there.
Before we've gotten any sense of the father-son acrimony at work here, we meet -- or sort-of meet -- Frank's team, hard at work in the cave before Josh, Carl and Victoria's arrival: We know something bad is going to happen soon, because one of Frank's divers -- did I mention there's lots of water in this particular unexplored cave system? -- isn't feeling particularly well but swears that, dammit, she's going to dive anyway.
Brace yourself for a minor spoiler -- or avert your eyes for a moment if you prefer to go into the movie as cold as a corpse in a wetsuit -- but people die in Sanctum. Not that we're ever made to care enough about any of them to be sorry to see them go. When a member of Frank's team learns of that first death -- he actually watches the whole thing on a monitor stationed at a remote location -- the words that emerge from his lips ring with mournful Shakespearean dignity. They are, and I quote, "Oh, man! F--k!"
And that's before a cyclone-style storm (foretold, I kid you not, by an indigenous wise man -- maybe he knows bad weather is coming because the bone in his nose starts aching) hits the cave, threatening to flood it and drown all the unlucky bastards inside. To death, even! The rest of Sanctum consists pretty much of explorers meeting various unpleasant ends. Grierson follows each death with a few hasty dabs of pathos (we see one survivor or another groaning to the heavens, or kneeling forlornly beside a dead body -- that sort of thing) before moving on, as if guided by the tick of a metronome, to the next kicking of the proverbial bucket.
The actors -- many of whom are Australian performers not well known outside their own country -- seem to know their place in this little charade: They're really just scale models dotting a 3-D diorama, and they perform accordingly. Wakefield's Josh scowls a lot, but in the Tiger Beat way: It's really more of a "No one understands me! But aren't I hot?" pout. Gruffudd -- who made a charismatic and downright sexy William Wilberforce in the underappreciated 2006 historical drama Amazing Grace -- looks miserable, like a man whose dreams of being a real actor have been stretched, Reed Richards-style, beyond the point of recognizability. Roxburgh is perhaps the most appealing of all: His Frank is a grumpy cave expert who wonders why he's surround by morons, and you can certainly see where he's coming from.
But enough about the dramatic creaking and groaning of Sanctum. How does the thing look? The picture's most effective moments are the ones in which divers are forced to navigate the narrowest underwater tunnels imaginable. Grierson and his DP, Jules O'Loughlin, shoot these sequences in a way that makes us feel squeezed, too: They move the camera in close, as if it were a curious, intrusive fish. And Sanctum uses 3-D well enough to turn us on to the occasional wonder of nature, like a stalactite hanging majestically from an underwater cave's ceiling, like Poseidon's uvula.
But mostly, not even the supposedly thrilling underwater sequences look that great: The best they can manage is a murky grayish glow -- that lack of brightness and color clarity is the big trade-off with 3-D, and we're all supposed to pretend we don't notice. Cameron is, of course, a great believer in the future of 3D movies, and whether you like Avatar or not, it's reasonable to say that he's pushed the form further than anyone has. (Though I have far more affection for Werner Herzog's own soon-to-be-released 3-D cave-exploration adventure Cave of Forgotten Dreams than I'll ever have for Avatar.) But Sanctum, even though it bears Cameron's name on the credits, feels more like a tired novelty than a bold chess move toward the fulfillment of 3-D's promise, whatever that was supposed to be. Film editor and sound designer Walter Murch recently summed up 3D in a letter to Roger Ebert, published on Ebert's blog: "So: dark, small, stroby, headache inducing, alienating. And expensive."
The 3-D revolution is a sham. Digital technology -- not to mention that we still have cinematographers who care about the old-school nuts and bolts of their craft -- should mean that regular old 2-D movies have the potential to look more beautiful than ever. So why, with increasing frequency, are we having to settle for watching movies in Murk-o-vision?