Thursday, March 31, 2011

Sanctum (2011) 3D

Sanctum is a 3D adventure drama film directed by Alister Grierson and executive produced by James Cameron. It's a survival story of a small expedition group*  that gets trapped inside an underwater cave. They suspect the air pocket they're trapped in will be filled with water before they would be rescued, so the group decides to take the risk and try finding another way out.
*(George, Carl, Victoria, Frank and his son Josh, played by in the same order: Daniel Wyllie, Ioan Gruffudd, Alice Parkinson, Richard Roxburgh and Rhys Wakefield)

Sanctum has got many very beautiful scenes in the underwater caves, and this way it makes good use of the 3D effects. On the other hand, there are many annoying details in the 3D such as the ones I mentioned before, tree branches etc., and also in some scenes there are a huge amount of these 3D air bubbles, which are mostly distracting instead of being nice to watch.

The movie is easy to follow, because the plot is fairly simple. The side plot between the father and son wasn't bad either. Now that I think about it, the storyline is also quite repetitive. After the group is trapped inside the cave, practically the same few main events keep happening till the very end of the movie. Despite the repetitiveness, the movie does take a good hold of the audience and doesn't have many boring or uninteresting dialogue scenes. It has got a very strong and tense atmosphere throughout the adventure, and some diving moments are literally breathtaking (heh). Could say there are a few quite shocking moments aswell.

There are a few minor points which I didn't find very reasonable. For example the scene with the deadly foamy water pool inside the caves, it wasn't explained at all, the movie just expects the audience to believe these kind of underground geysir-vortexes exist. Secondly the fact that they didn't seem to have any safety plan or alternate measures made to escape the cave in a worst case scenario, even though they knew a huge rain storm is coming! Yet another odd thing is, that there just "happened" to be a rock big enough to block the only entrance to the part of the cave they were having their exploring camp in, and it just "happened" to start moving when this particular rain occured.

The cast of this movie is pretty much unkown to me. In my opinion, they did a fine job as the characters. In the beginning the acting and dialogue reminds of some sort of a soap opera, but it got better later on. And once again, when there are interesting side characters, the movie gets them killed them as soon as possible. Annoying.

As a conclusion, Sanctum does meet the expectations pretty well, it has some exciting moments and it's overall entertaining. I think it is worth watching in 3D, since it doesn't have those annoying "flying towards the camera" effects.

11 comments:

  1. thanks for the review. the only thing going for it was attaching cameron's name. :)

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  2. Interesting, seems like it is worth watching.
    Thanks, will go to the movies when it arrives!

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  3. Had not thought of this movie much and with your review I think even less of this.

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  4. Sounds meh. The regular version might be OK to check out, but nothing I'm gonna wait up for.

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  5. produced by cameron is what got my attention

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  6. thanks dude, the 3d for me as well is the only draw

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  7. very nice review :D I must watch this movie :D

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  8. What you said was basically my thoughts, without having seen it -- the only thing this movie has going for it is "Cameron" and "3D." Which is not enough to earn my money.

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  9. eeeeh I hope Hollywood gets off this 3D craze soon. I really can not stand it.

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