Master diver Frank McGuire has explored the South Pacific's Esa-ala Caves for months. But when his exit is cut off in a flash flood, Frank's team—including 17-year-old son Josh and financier Carl Hurley are forced to radically alter plans. With dwindling supplies, the crew must navigate an underwater labyrinth to make it out.
17 Feb Sanctum (2011)
Enclosed
We still have things to discover about 3D movies. It is not at all clear that market forces and corporate interests will drive us toward more powerful art.
A basic problem is whether the brain will allow itself to be fooled. I suppose it can and that the added artifice will be leverageable by real artists. But well before that we need the appropriate extension of our cinematic vocabulary.
We probably can do better than turning that job over to James Cameron. I wistfully watched the 3G version of ‘Dial M for Murder‘ and watched how master framed and moved. Cameron is comparatively a dullard, but the experiments here are obvious and somewhat interesting.
We have some of the standard stuff: low flying through valleys for instance. But we also have every conceivable notion of visual containment: vertical and horizontal tubes, flows of different types that are near or that impinge. Immersion. Helmet interiors. Darkness locally erased by light, some of which is in postproduction.
We have natural, artificial and human containment. An entire catalog is explored. Fortunately, the movie is so trite and predictable that we can watch the clinical experiment instead of the story.
I applaud Cameron for taking this work seriously. I think he actually innovated a bit with the water coming down. But we shouldn‘t have to pay with our dimes and eyetime.
Posted in 2011
Ted’s Evaluation — 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
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