Sands of Oblivion

I'm at this very moment debating whether I should even finish watching this "poppycock" of a movie. They had a pretty interesting idea, with the buried movie set, and that was it. So far this incomprehensible mess has no real story. There is the buried set, some wolf headed monster running amok, an amulet, and a bunch of bad actors attacked by the wolf masked whatever it is. What I would have missed, had I had the good sense to eject this nonsense is a dune buggy chase, some really bad C.G.I., some incredibly stupid dialog, more bad C.G.I., and the hero fighting paper cut outs. Other than the original idea, this film has absolutely zero redeeming qualities. My mistake for continuing to watch. - MERK

Over the years I've seen some pretty decent story ideas that the SciFi Channel has used as a basis for original films. They've usually gone to the bad because the money and/or skill needed to make them A quality entertainment just wasn't there.

THE SANDS OF OBLIVION gives them the chance to mess up not a good idea but a potentially awesome one that could have been as exciting as THE MUMMY or RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. Unfortunately, the great idea just fizzles out.

The basis of the story is that when Cecil B. DeMille made the original, silent THE TEN COMMANDMENTS the studio bulldozed the elaborate sets in the California desert instead of recycling the lumber and other building materials. It seems that there had been genuine Egyptian artifacts used in the set and something Very Bad had been unleashed.

In the present day people are digging up the old desert location, and Something Bad is once again free to roam the Earth.

The cast is adequate to the job, and the special effects are really pretty decent. But the script and direction are uneven, and the film never finds a consistent tone. It veers into comedy and seems to disregard the numerous people killed by the newly unleashed monster. Near the end there's a dune buggy race that's professionally filmed but seems to have been cut in from another movie.

The original TEN COMMANDMENTS had a segment set in contemporary times (the 1920's) concerning the building of a cathedral with substandard material and the tragedy of putting cost and convenience in too high a position. A similar theme could have been developed with the lumber, which would be very well preserved in a desert climate.

THE SANDS OF OBLIVION is certainly worth watching, but the main thing I kept thinking was what might have been.

Worse than the rating it has been given. This is a typical SciFi movie nowadays: bad to awful acting, a script that is poorly written, and shoddy direction. From the opening scene where DeMille is burying his set to the end, this movie is terrible. In the beginning scenes this movie has Moses (which was Charlton Heston in the DeMille film), Pharoah (Yul Brynner) and Nefretiri (Anne Baxtor) overlooking a boy burying a box in the sand. The characters that were to represent the three aforementioned icons were awful and had to resemblance to the people they were to "supposedly" be. The fact that this is in the desert away from civilization is hilarious when someone is hurt and they are all yelling for an ambulance. The screenwriter obviously is oblivious to the fact that there are no ambulances in the middle of the desert. I was sorely disappointed that Morena Baccarin decided to do a film of such low quality.

I found "Sands of Oblivion" to be passable entertainment, which I kept watching for the joy of seeing Jayne and Inara together again. The evil entity was pretty lame....what was its goals? Take over the world, or just kill people because he/it was angry about something? The efforts of the hero and heroine were all aimed at saving themselves, which didn't seem to be worth documenting.

I liked the hero, Jayne and Inara did well, the special effects were OK, there was good comic relief with the Buford character, and a really good shock early on in the show. I didn't miss the two hours I spent on this show. For those reasons, I give it a six out of ten.

Sands of Oblivion is not a bad movie, it's just that it is not a particularly good one either. It did have potential to be though, with one of the best ideas SyFy ever had. The acting while not great is pretty decent, the dune buggy chase is exciting, the film is photographed quite nicely in more places than not and there is some striking scenery. However, the special effects are uneven, none of them are as bad as the ones(for example) for Titanic II but while some are serviceable, others are on the cheap side. The script is rather lazy and never consistent in tone, the story lacks thrills, a genuine sense of adventure and suspense for a movie typical of this genre and is never sure of what it wants to be and the characters are underdeveloped and clichéd(not just genre clichés but SyFy clichés too). In conclusion, lacklustre, had a wonderful idea and started off promisingly but fizzled out. 4/10 Bethany Cox