Sanctum, When Australia Tries to do it Big American Style, and Makes all the Same Mistakes

[I waited four weeks to put up this review because there are spoilers, and I figure after a month no one will care…if they ever did]

The new movie Sanctum is about a team of Australian cave divers who get trapped in a cave during a monsoon and get picked off one by one by various factors. It’s the latest in a genre of what I call “White People Putting Themselves in Danger Movies.” Of course, there is a single person of color in the movie (who I don’t even think is given a name in the film beyond “that guy”), and of course he dies early on after heroically going back to save the white people when he could have escaped to safety. As the lone non-Caucasian character, he should have known better.

And that’s the real problem with Sanctum. Even though it is about a relatively new subject—underwater cave diving/exploration—made by a country known for doing things their own way, Sanctum never fully escapes the clichés of the genre Hollywood has beaten to death in two or three “White People Putting Themselves in Danger Movies” a year since Jurassic Park exploded onto the scene. The genre follows the winning formula of being a snuff film posing as an adventure movie. With occasionally slow moments where the characters tell each other how they really feel before running off to the next action piece.

What Does Work: Some of the scenery is truly beautiful (although ruined if you see the movie in 3D because of how fake it looks) and original. Plus, it has one of the more realistic depictions of the “Bends” (a syndrome where divers surface too quickly, causing their blood to bubble) ever filmed.

What Doesn’t Work: A list of clichés long as my arm—and at 6’4 I have a pretty impressive wing span—including, but by no means limited to:

5. The aforementioned noble person of color who goes back to save the white people, even if he is drowned for his troubles a minute later.

4. The fat, single guy with a beard not being given much to do until he dies. I’ll just limit this by saying that you will be able to guess the deaths in Sanctum and even the order they happen in because it sticks so close to the formula for this type of movie.

3. The evil American businessman. You just have to have one of them in a foreign movie, just like American movies love to feature evil British/Australian businessmen. I don’t have a particular problem with this as I think evil businessmen come in all nationalities, as evidenced by Dick Cheney and Rupert Murdoch. What Sanctum does differently is it presents him as a reasonably sane, likable guy…and has him go off the rails for no good reason towards the end. Plus, he has a hot trophy girlfriend who strips down for no good reason but you knew it was coming the second you saw her.

2. That drowning is a painless form of death! There are a handful of moments in this film where a character is about to die but another character somehow decides it’s less painful to just drown them.

1. The father/son relationship at the core of this movie is gag inducing. The dad is a blowhard, ultimate cave diver who only cares about that and has neglected his son…I get bored just writing this shit, let alone watching it. Plus, the dad is supposedly a “purist” who hates that he has had to take the American businessman’s money, adding a familiar anti-corporate message (yay!) but refusing to commit to it beyond a couple sentences of dialogue (boo!).

What I would have done differently: Probably gotten rid of the characters, because the movie doesn’t really care about them anyway. By getting rid of them, I mean not having archetypes like “The evil businessman,” the “tough guy you hate but will keep you alive,” the “trophy girlfriend,” and the teenage son who’s smarter than you think. The movie just uses the race, age, and gender of its characters to fill in as back story, so I guess I wouldn’t even put that “effort” into it. How refreshing would it be to see an adventure movie lay its cards on the table and just have characters call each other “Old man who sacrifices himself” or “hot young woman who’s as good as dead after we find a shameless excuse to get her half naked?”