Rock bottom

Noel Vera

Bruce Hunt's "The Cave" pretty much proves that the wellspring of
more original ideas is close to running dry in mainstream Hollywood.
The thinking must have gone something like this: if you have to do
yet another monster-chases-humans flick, where can you set it?
Forests have been done, old houses have been done, spaceships have
been done to death; even outposts in Antarctica and the New York
Museum of Natural History have been done. A cave or rather network
of caves is a fairly good setting--lots of dark nooks and crannies
where unholy creatures can hide; lots of tight spaces where a
hapless explorer can panic and flail (or float) around uselessly
before being sashimied by the movie star.

The movie begins with a brief prologue in the '70s, where a bunch of
people open up the floor of a Romanian church with explosives; the
resulting blast collapses the floor, dropping them into the cave,
and sets off an avalanche, burying the church above. Ominous fade-
out--which, truth to tell, was the best, most unsettling moment in
the whole picture: you wonder what on earth happened to those people
trapped down there--and fade-in to present day Mexico: a crack team
of cave-divers has been called in to explore an intricate network of
caverns, many of them submerged, found in--guess where? Romania, of
course. The team needs little motivation to start exploring and
wastes even less time going in; then, of course, the silt hits the
fan…

Problem with such a lean introduction is that you don't really get
to know the people, and, as important, their reasons for possibly
risking their lives going into that cave; you don't know why they're
in such an all-fired hurry to dive in and look around. The actors
mime their excitement well enough (and in Cole Hauser something a
little more--a sense of self-absorbed intensity, bordering on the
psychotic, that makes you and the rest of his team a little
nervous), but they've essentially left you behind at the entrance.
Cave exploring, particularly of the kind that requires scuba gear,
is a peculiar activity, and like all peculiar activities, it needs
gentle introduction and thorough exposition to reveal the special
flavors of this special interest. Speaking to someone who did this
sort of thing for a living, I noted that he had one hand bandaged;
he explained that he had fallen and sprained his wrist. When asked
what makes him go down in the dark and risk his life looking around,
he told me simply: "it's the need to go and see or discover
something no one's ever seen before. To be there before anyone
else." If anyone in this picture had stopped long enough to express
something similar, maybe we'd understand these people more.

Unfair of me to evoke the name of Akira Kurosawa, but he had a
special genius in doing this sort of thing, going into the details
of something as dramatic as the defense of an entire village ("Seven
Samurai"), or as mundane as the management of a clinic ("Red
Beard"), or reconstruction of some past crime ("Rashomon," "High and
Low"), and make the exposition of how it's done as fascinating as
anything you've ever heard--make that exposition, in fact, the heart
of the story, the eventual outcome of which (village successfully
defended, clinic successfully managed, crime totally exposed)
generates the suspense that draws you into that story.

"This Cave" is a perfect example of a team of filmmakers who didn't
bother to do that simple (yet somehow difficult--it's the simplest
things that are hardest to do, or for some reason are least likely
to be done, most of all in movies) act; instead, they have to tart
up their spelunking with an unlikely horror story about monsters of
legend haunting these caves; this being Romania, the word "vampire"
seems an obvious one to bring up, yet they don't bother to take
advantage of even that connection. They do have a twist about three-
fourths into the picture, a twist someone who's seen both "Alien"
and "The Relic" would probably have guessed after the first twenty
minutes.

And even with plot and storyline, director Hunt might have done
something, turn this into a nice little genre exercise, but he
doesn't even trust the twists, much less the milieu or act of cave
exploration, to sustain our interest; he has to try crank up the
spookiness of the caves with hard-thumping music (he seems terrified
we might fall asleep) and loud scrabbling sounds; he uses hand-held
camerawork, with the apparent idea that this gives him the license
to swish the camera around every which way, then edits the appalling
mess together music-video style, with plenty of shock cuts. Hunt was
second-unit director to several visually memorable productions (this
is his first feature as a director): the "Matrix" movies and "Dark
City;" unlike the Wachowskis or Alex Proyas he apparently hasn't
acquired the confidence of a real filmmaker, and feels he has to
vigorously massage the mixture, chop it fine, add an overdose of
spicy music and special effects.

Which is a pity. The movie was shot on location, in Romania, which
has a wealth of caves (about 12,000 in all), and what you see of
these subterranean networks--in between the shock cuts and swish-
pans and general mayhem--seems breathtaking. Such wonderful
locations deserves a thoughtful, well worked-out film to do them
justice; not necessarily a Discovery Channel-style documentary--a
horror picture would work as well. But Hunt doesn't seem to
understand that horror and beauty can mix in all kinds of ways to
form memorable imagery (think of the 1922 "Nosferatu," and how
Murnau used the mountainous Czech landscape to create an atmosphere
of dread for his film); he doesn't seem to understand that sometimes
the greatest horror of all inside a cave is its stillness--the sense
that you are inside an enormous silence, in intimate contact with
the kind of darkness that has existed for thousands of years, and
will exist for thousands more. Very little of that kind of stillness-
-or silence--to be found in "The Cave."

(First published in Businessworld, 9/2/05)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)