Your cinematic genius put Schwarzenegger and “I’ll be back” into the American Lexicon. You showed $1.8 billion worth of viewers the Heart of the Ocean was really a legendary shipwreck at the bottom of the Atlantic and you had an entire legion of tree huggers convinced that CGI giant blue humanoids live in perfect harmony with nature somewhere out in the Cosmos. Despite our personal distain for you as a person, your unquestionable gift to make really good movies has drawn us in to theaters again and again. But not this time, Mr. Cameron. This time, Mr. King of the World, you may have struck your iceberg and they call it Sanctum.
To be fair, James Cameron only lent his financial support to the aquatic spelunking adventure. It was directed by someone whose name escapes me as it will escape everyone else because this should have been straight to rental gem won’t be launching any careers. However, since Cameron seems egotistically fine with whoring his name out to market this movie he will bare the blunt force trauma I wish to inflict.
In the interest of full disclosure I have not seen this movie nor do I intend to ever see it. I have suspected since the first airing of its namedropping trailer this flick would be an epic fail. I just read through a handful of Hollywood insider spoilers which confirmed my suspicions. Sanctum is a pre-apocalyptic Waterworld without the redemption of humanity subplot. It is 90 plus minutes of really neat Discovery Channel underwater shots in 3-D minus the animated prehistoric predator fish you wish would swim by and eat the entire cast.
Sanctum’s plot is painfully simple and predictable. A group of overconfident scuba divers, none of which the audience will learn to love, enter uncharted oceanic caves only to have their single point of entry blocked by the wrath of Mother Nature. Not being able to turn back they must dive further into the unknown in the hopes of finding another way to the surface. Think Poseidon (remake or original) without the capsized boat. Better yet think “The Cave,” that 2005 nobody saw it until it was on Showtime thriller of the same premise. Except that The Cave had what some might hope to see in Sanctum but won’t. It had a previously undiscovered species of translucent, flesh-eating, cave-dwelling predators who, as actress Piper Perabo painfully discovers right before her untimely demise, “can friggin’ fly!”
In The Cave the trapped divers need to find their way to the surface before either the creatures eat them all or their group leader, bitten by a creature, fully transforms into one and eats the cast himself. I won’t spoil Sanctum’s not so unique but inspired from true events story other than to say people die but none that you feel sorry about and none at the hands of creepy looking monsters. Translation: Boring. Not all real life stories are worthy of scripts and wasted film.
Perhaps, in an attempt to attract a demographic more inclined to let go of their disposable income in this economy, Cameron should have 1) had an all male cast of soap opera handsome actors; and 2) renamed the movie “Sphincter.” That way he could have at least touted the characters’ struggle to reach the surface as analogous with an individual’s search for self identity and a group’s struggle to live open in a society determined to keep them submerged in the dark, cold abyss of intolerance. He could have used this as a vehicle to push the envelope in a Hollywood still only comfortable with writing one dimensional characters like ‘girl’s best guy friend’ or the flat retreads of the cast of “Queer Eye” (who themselves are clichéd imitations of stereotypical 70’s male fashionistas – cut to close up of Jack Tripper’s femininely pursed lips and flamboyantly batting eyelashes juxtaposed with Mr. Furley’s near convulsive moral majority disgust. Yet Furley is the one in the leisure suit and flowery ascot? But I digress…)
It would have been hailed by critics as the most uplifting movie since “Brokeback Mountain
Too over the top, you say? Absolutely, but hyperbole is an effective tool to drive home the point that anything probably would have worked better than what Sanctum is, a really bad movie with a big Hollywood backer. Sphincter would have made more money than Sanctum will and the Cameron moniker would have been associated with more favorable reviews. Any tweak of Sanctum’s plot would have worked better. Rest assured Cameron’s ego is big enough to weather this storm. Much like his T-800 series Terminator, Cameron ‘will be back’ and soon enough we will all be memorized again by the creative wizardry and visually intoxicating marvel that is Pandora and an Avatar sequel. It really is inevitable.
