Cave

I caught this on Netflix, I was drawn in by the premise and the 4 3/4 out of 5 stars on Netflix (I always wonder what that means).

At first I was thrown off by the dubbing, the dialogue was obviously dubbed in English, which seemed strange since I was looking at 3 Anglo-looking European or American actors, but I eventually figured out that they were Scandinavian of some variety.

To get right to it, the story and plot wasn't great and it was pretty stilted at times but I have to say the cinematography, scenes, shots, lighting, and backgrounds were truly spectacular (seriously). It was like watching an episode of Planet Earth or the Discovery channel. I don't know anything about cameras or film making but the scenes were beautiful and captivating.

There was very little plot or background, I guess the 3 characters were supposed to be ex- soldiers on an adventure. They looked like, respectively, a soldier, a soccer mom, and someone who works in a brewery. But hey they are all attractive enough and really I thought the acting was pretty good, given what they had to work with. There was no chemistry, or like negative chemistry, between the two characters that were a couple, but maybe that was part of the point. I think the entire movie had just 3 actors.

This could have been a tense thriller like Blair Witch or Descent which is maybe what they set out to do but after a bunch of build up, without mentioning any spoilers, the whole story was a bit of a let down and not much to it (but shot in beautiful scenes). In retrospect the story is probably a lot more realistic in terms of what would actually happen in a situation like that but you go into the movie expecting ghouls or supernatural monsters or whatever so it's kind of a let down.

I ended the movie pretty disappointed but there were definitely some unexpected bright spots, I'll be looking for the actors and director in other movies. It just seems like they had a good idea and they lost all of their funding 1/3 the way into the movie or something.

The script is predictable, slow at times, the acting inadequate. But the filming and location was good. The film is ok, I saw it through.... but I am no fan of cliffhangers.

The writing is awful and the characters are very stupid. A complete waste of time.

When I first came across the description of this movie I thought it sounded something like "The Descent" - a movie I really enjoyed. I decided to watch it, thinking that it would be a poor copy of that movie. But it's not a copy. There are no monsters - just basically a love triangle between three people (two guys, one girl) who decide to explore some normally off-limits caves. With a diving element involved in this, I also thought it sounded a bit like "Sanctum" - which I also enjoyed. I suppose there are some loose similarities to both of those movies, but basically I was disappointed in this. It's a very short movie (under an hour and a half) - which might be the best thing about it, since you leave it behind at least knowing that you didn't waste too much of your time on it.

It's a Norwegian movie. I watched a version dubbed into English. That makes it somewhat difficult to offer an assessment of the cast - but none of them really stood out to me. It does manage to capture the claustrophobic environment of spelunking - but, then again, surely that isn't especially hard to capture. There really didn't seem to be a lot of chemistry between the three leads and the movie was neither especially tense (although there were a couple of moments) nor was it at all frightening. I'm not one who is big on long extended introductions to movies just for the purpose of establishing a backstory for the characters, but to be honest a little bit of that would have been helpful. As the movie goes on bits and pieces of this are revealed (so Charlotte, who's in a relationship with Adrian, used to be in a relationship with Viktor; and we find out that the three had apparently served together ion Afghanistan) but we don't really learn that much about them and by the time what we do learn begins to be revealed - well, to be honest I had kind of lost interest.

The movie's open-ended, suggesting the possibility of a sequel (which, in fact, is "promised" - or threatened?) in the closing captions. I won't be watching it. (4/10)

Predictable. Waste of time. No plot so cannot give spoiler.