Sanctum

IMDB
First time viewed: Yes
Current Release: Yes
Watched With: Jordan, Tyler

There have been quite a few Cave-themed horror films of late. This is a based-on-a-true-story drama though, so no fun monsters here. Unless you count the monstrous dialogue.

I can see why they didn't shoot piranha in 3D and went for post-conversion. Lighting on water and the sheen on wet skin causes havoc in 3D. The even the slightest offset between images is enough to shift the hot spots so they cause strange ghosting. Maybe nobody else notices. Underwater looks great though.

The other problem with a film like this and 3D is the lighting. Films set in dark locations aren't helped by the fact that the glasses make darken the image further. I don't know if it was intentional or not that they were brightening up the images with extra light to compensate for this, but when you are in a situation where the only light sources are clearly displayed in the frame it destroys the illusion a little to have entire backgrounds lit up by tiny light sources. The Cave suffered from this problem too. I liked the lighting in The Decent though.

ANYWAY how was the film? Umm, it was alright I guess. There are some hilarious character expositional lines shoehorned in at the start. The characters feel kinda stock, there's really only one note to each of them. They are mainly there to have enough people to die along the way. And apart from one at the start and maybe one at the end, the way each one of them dies is foreshadowed a mile away so there was never really much tension for me. The action was ok, the sequences were well put together but the whole thing was just uninvolving.