Review: The Descent

When I first heard about this movie, albeit a year late since it came out in Europe in 2005, I was intrigued. “Holy cow,” I thought, “they finally made a film about that great FPS computer game I used to play as a kid!”

Oh, how disappointed I was to see that it was just a cave of the Valkyries

The Descent is a film about six adventure seeking women who meet one year after one of them has a terrible accident to go spelunking in a cave. They get trapped in the depths of the cave and then discover that there’s some golem-like monsters in the cave who want to eat them. I won’t name any of the actresses because to be blunt there’s no real point. There’s barely enough character development in the film to understand the main protagonist’s inner-psyche, but the rest of the team aside from one other is barely ever touched on. It gets to the point where you don’t even remember which character you’re looking at as they run through the cave screaming while being chased by a cave monster.

The cinematography of the first half of the film is top notch. Director Neil Marshall does a good job of placing is within the claustrophobic environment, and the amateur DV-ish shots work. The scariest part of the film for everyone was, and will be, the shot around halfway through that occurs from the mini-DV camera’s POV. The girls are looking around for a noise they heard, and in the darkness of the cave they are forced to use the nightvision mode on the camera they bring along. This allows for a Blair Witch-esque moment where we see one of the creatures sneaking up behind the girls. The problem comes when Marshall decides it’s time to reveal what’s behind the curtain. This is when we begin to see the monsters walking around completely visible and in plain sight. If anyone learned anything from Ridley Scott, it’s that the imagination is one of the most powerful tools a director can use to manipulate the audience. The reason that the alien in Alien was so scary is because you never saw the entire figure, only parts coming out in the darkness. The scare factor of The Descent drops to zero once they show the creatures in full view, which they do for the rest of the film.

This brings me to another point. Why, oh why, do U.S. distributors not trust American audiences with depressing endings? If you didn’t know already, the U.S. release of The Descent is missing around 2 minutes at the end of the film which, in my opinion, is very important in terms of the main character’s development. If you want to see the ending it’s available on the internet at places like youtube.com.

5 / 10