Earlier this year, I said that — based on the trailer alone — Sanctum appeared to be a terrible film.  At the time, a few people disagreed with me.  “Yes,” they said, “the trailer is a collection of clichés and the plot looks incredibly predictable and the selected dialogue is so tin-plated that it probably attracts radio waves but this is just an adventure film.  STOP BEING SO GODDAMN JUDGMENTAL, LISA MARIE!”

Well, needless to say, that made me shut my little ol’ mouth all nice and quick.

Anyway, Sanctum opened in theaters on Super Bowl weekend and, if I remember correctly, it didn’t even play for a full week.  It was such a box office bomb that it was yanked out and replaced by a Miley Cyrus film on Tuesday.  Again, that’s if my memory serves correctly.  As a result, I didn’t get a chance to see this film in the theaters.  Instead, I had to wait to see it OnDemand.  Was it as bad as I expected?  Well, it wasn’t quite the disaster I was expecting but, at the same time, I still find myself resenting having to admit that I actually “demanded” to see Sanctum.

There are two misconceptions that need to be cleared up about Sanctum.  One is that it’s a James Cameron film.  Cameron is credited as being executive producer because his 3-D cameras were used to film the movie.  (Also, I’ve read that he is a friend of Andrew Wright, who co-wrote the script.)  However, the film itself was directed by Alister Grierson who tries to give everything a Cameronesque feel.  In Grierson’s defense, he succeeds in that all of the characters are forgettable and that you’re never actually surprised by anything that happens on-screen. 

The other is that the film is, as we’re told during the opening credits, based on a true story.  Actually, it’s based on the fact that Andrew Wright apparently likes to swim around in caves and he once got trapped with a party he was leading and nearly drowned.  However, nobody in his party died and I’m guessing that, at some point, someone may have actually said something half-way witty.  As a result, that incident doesn’t really seem to have much to do with anything seen during Sanctum.  As a lover of grindhouse and exploitation films, the blatant falsehood of the “Based on a true story” credit doesn’t bug me.  In fact, it was my favorite part of the film.

Anyway, Sanctum is about a bunch of cave divers who get stuck in a flood and have to swim and dive their way to safety.  It actually starts out pretty well, with a lot of aerial footage of Papua New Guinea and the initial cave diving scenes are genuinely exciting.  But then, eventually, the story has to start up and everyone start to talk and the actors have to breathe some life into the cardboard characters and the whole film becomes so determined to be nothing special that it starts to get genuinely annoying. 

Eventually, the cave ends up flooding and I guess you’re supposed to wonder — who will survive?  Will it be model Victoria (Alison Parkinson), who keeps panicking because she’s a woman?  Or how about Victoria’s boyfriend (played by Ioan Gruffod), who is rich and unlikable?  How about George (Dan Wylde), who is getting older and serves as a mentor/sidekick to the group?  Or maybe it’ll be Luko (Cramer Crain), who is a native who specifically decides to stick around to save all the white foreigners.  Or how about the crusty, veteran diver (Richard Roxburgh, who has apparently never met a line he couldn’t shout into pointlessness) who has a strained relationship with his headstrong song (Rhys Wakefield) who just happens to be trapped down there with them all?

Seriously, who’s going to survive!?

Anyway, if it seems like I’m being really hard on this film, it’s because there’s enough hints of what the film could have been that it makes you resent, all the more, what the film eventually turned out to be.  As I said before, even at its worst, the film is beautiful to look at.  Admittedly, I’m both scared of water and intensely claustrophobic but, even taking that into account, the early scenes of the cave flooding and the characters fighting for survival are well-directed and genuinely frightening.  This is a film that is at it’s best when characters are drowning because it means they can’t speak and we don’t have to listen to anymore of that terrible dialogue.

In the end, Sanctum goes to show that sometimes, you should trust the trailer…