Review of Sanctum (2011) by Shiira — 13 Feb 2011

Mother Nature is the monster. No aliens here, just a lot of rain, water made malicious by the forces of the cosmos, and then, gravity. Besides, what would aliens be doing in a cave system anyway? It's a question that Neal Marshall's "The Descent" never answers.

Think about it. These extra-terrestrials travel all those miles, galaxies upon galaxies, to conquer...caves. Why caves? Now here comes "Sanctum". In the case of the diver team spelunking around the Papua New Guinea subterranean passageways of Esa Ala, a griping teenaged boy's cry of "Why caves?" to his explorer father gets a full explanation, but alas, Josh(Rhys Wakefield) must have a short memory, since he forgets the musings put forth by the expedition team's bank roller, prior to the hierarchical killings.

(Naturally, the indigenous crew member dies first.) Carl(Ioan Grufudd) tries to justify his father's unconventional life, which took him away from home in long stretches. He says, "Your old man is like Christopher Columbus, or Neal Armstrong," later adding that "there's nowhere else on the planet left to explore.

" Apparently, these great men, these iconoclasts of history, make no impression on Josh. (Does he even know who these men are?") With their lives hanging in the balance, the historically-challenged boy unloads all of his daddy issues on Frank(Richard Roxburgh) at the most inopportune time, whining like an overgrown baby about his father's chronic absenteeism, when his main concern should involve staving off imminent death from the infiltrating water that threatens to turn the caverns into watery graves.

Such is the fallacy of the filmic world, where time compression creates a juxtaposition encompassing personal matters with the visceral physicalities of the moment, the latter which should have everybody's full attention, but doesn't, in which the secondary goal of reconciliation is poised to overtake the primary goal of survival.

Fighting off mental and physical exhaustion, Frank, in response to his son's bad parenting diatribe, gets his metaphors mixed up, by comparing the cave to a church, and the cave system to religion, when in fact, caverns such as the Esa Ala, and others of its ilk, which took the veteran explorer away from his wife and child over the years, seems more like a mistress, and his penetration of her stone walls, an affair.

Frank's church is like something out of the Flannery O'Connor novel "Wise Blood", because it's a "Church Without Christ". "No god down here. We're just bits of dust passing through," says Frank(an Aussie Hazel Moates) to his only parishioner, "The Son Who Grew Up Without A Father", in between the deaths of their fellow divers, George(due to decompression sickness) and Victoria(on account of her stupidity), whom neither father nor son properly mourns like real people would.

As a leader of men, Frank sucks. Despite his reputation of being a great man, Frank puts his whole crew in mortal danger right from the start, when he wrongly predicts that the machines will warn its monitoring subordinates of any oncoming flooding.

The shouting obscures his incompetence. Frank's in charge, not his underlings, and yet he allows Judes(Allison Cratchley) to dive without a backup tank. It's Frank's job to neutralize her persistence with some persistence of his own.

Following the drowning, Josh criticizes him, and instead of taking it like a man, he implicates his son in the accident, citing how the boy didn't procure those extra tanks like he asked. Even worse, he allows Victoria(Alice Parkinson) to swim without a wet suit.

The novice diver(and Carl's girlfriend) insists that she'd rather be "cold and alive than warm and dead," when she refuses to wear Judes' gear. During their post-mortem(following Victoria's where she sacrifices herself for the greater good), Josh call his father a "heartless bastard", but after a couple of minutes, they're hugging; they patch things up, right after Frank earnestly compares his passion to a religion, and for some asinine reason, this seems to satisfy Josh.

Forgiveness should be doled out incrementally, but "Sanctum" treats their reconciliation, as it does everything else, like a plot point, as it marches forward into the abyss of formulaic filmmaking.