As the summer draws near its
inevitable end, this year even the seasonal blockbusters exhibit a certain
fatigue, as if Hollywood itself gradually succumbed to heat, humidity, and box
office lethargy.
From the laborious dullness of Revenge of the Sith to the ersatz
warfare of Stealth to the bourgeois
melodrama of The War of the Worlds,
most of the summer spectaculars have sputtered and crashed among crowds of
disappointed viewers and reviewers. One of the last action features of the
season, The Cave, appropriately
buries its particular adventure far below the surface, sinking its story,
characters, and ultimately, its meaning in the depths of the Earth.
The film involves an expedition by a
team of scientists and divers investigating an enormous cave that lies beneath
an ancient ruined abbey in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania.
Although the filmmakers claim that
their story derives from actual discoveries of underground caverns, rivers, and
various new flora and fauna in that region, it actually suggests some debt to
all those film adaptations of Jules Verne’s novel, A Voyage to the Center of the Earth, that always seemed to star
Doug McClure. In Cave, however, the
explorers find not some alien civilization nor even some chthonic creature out
of ancient myth but a whole eco-system apparently dominated by horrible
monsters.
After a relatively meaningless and
generally irrelevant introduction, the movie constructs its simple story around
the group of adventurers, experienced ocean divers, who join Romanian
researchers in a daring journey into a huge cavern. Employing the latest
technology, they descend more than a mile beneath the surface, then swim
through an underground river another two miles to an island where they plan to
establish a subterranean base camp and examine the landscape for a number of
days.
Naturally as soon as the team
achieves its first objective, everything, as every member of the audience
expects, goes terribly wrong. A rock fall seals off their exit, which means
they must find some other way out of the cave or die of starvation and thirst.
Even worse, some frightening beasts appear and start viciously attacking the
members of the crew, wounding the leader, Jack (Cole Hauser) and killing
several others; the plot then propels the group through a series of struggles
against the monsters, while they also desperately search for some way out.
When the scientists examine a body
part from the menace, they discover that it combines characteristics of a
number of animals — reptiles, amphibians, apparently even mammals — and
apparently dwells at the top of the food chain in the cave’s isolated
eco-system. After their initial horror at becoming the monster’s prey, the
scientists learn that the beast somehow introduces its parasitic cells into its
victims, in effect turning them into itself. The victims, they realize, also
eventually become monsters themselves.
All of that no doubt sounds
terrifically scary and exciting, just the thing for a late summer evening at
the megaplex. Unfortunately, however, the unending series of attacks and
escapes, the many scenes of rock climbing, underwater swimming, and universal
anguish soon grow repetitive and wearisome. The essentially static situation,
enlivened only by periodic battles with the monsters, also devolves into
internal quarreling over which route to take and who is qualified to lead the
team out, rather like a 1950s science fiction flick dealing with such matters
as trust and the conflict between science and action.
The cast, hardly a stellar bunch of
performers, swims and climbs and sweats and agonizes for the claustrophobic
length of the film. Clothed in wet suits and diving masks, they tend to look
alike too much of the time, which tends to underline their anonymity. The
director constantly films them in tight closeups, which maintains the confusion
and suggests a low budget approach to the action scenes — all jumpy camera
work, shouts, screams, dim lighting, and vague chaos.
The monster itself, mostly shown only
in glimpses, combines the reptile with the insect, and clearly owes a good deal
to the Alien movies and perhaps even The Creature From the Black Lagoon, but
also flies, which makes it all the more formidable. In fact, both the
scientists and the cave divers should have been better prepared for some
airborne predator that infects its victims’ blood: The Carpathians after all,
is where Count Dracula hung out.
The Cave (PG-13), directed by Bruce
Hunt, is playing at Canandaigua Theatres, Culver Ridge Cinemas, Greece Ridge
12, Henrietta 18, Tinseltown USA, Vintage Drive-In
This article appears in Aug 31 – Sep 6, 2005.
