Writer: Michael Steinberg, Tegan West
Director: Bruce Hunt
There are places man was never meant to go
There’s a lot to like about The Cave. Unfortunately there’s also a lot wrong with it. I swung back and forth between loving and hating it.
The movie begins in cold war Romania, thirty years ago. A group of Westerners discover an abandoned church in the mountains, beneath which is an entrance to an ancient cave. They go down to explore, only to become trapped. They soon discover that they’re not alone…
Cut to the present day and a group of geologists find a buried entrance to the same cave. Since much of the cave system is under water as well as under ground they call in a diving team to help with the investigation. The group become trapped and soon discover that they’re not alone…
OK, not exactly an original premise, but even a simple idea can be spun into a decent yarn. Not this time.
The start of The Cave wasn’t promising. The first scene, set 30 years ago, hinted that there was much more to know about the Westerners than we were ever told. It looked like a subplot that had been clumsily cut out. Then in the modern day setup we cut from the geologists to a pointless scene on a diving ship. Presumably it was intended to introduce us to the characters, but in reality it served no purpose whatsoever except to show off Piper Perabo’s (admittedly very watchable) body. When the protagonists finally got together we were treated to horribly stilted dialogue and sledgehammer exposition.
Fortunately things improved. For a while. The entrance to the cave and the early stages of the exploration really seemed to capture the thrill of exploring a ‘virgin cave’. I don’t know how realistic it was but it certainly felt believable. Once the body count started rising the watery setting made a pleasant change from the standard underground horror scenario. The action scenes were chaotic with the creatures at first barely glimpsed in the shadows, just how I like it.
Unfortunately the action is broken up by scenes of turgid expositional dialogue. These are simply badly written and the actors seem suitably embarrassed saying the lines. One particular scene appears to be a homage to a classic 1979 movie, however it serves only to remind us of how much better that film was. Steinberg and West are both (according to IMDB) inexperienced writers and I’m afraid it shows.
So The Cave is a mix of good atmosphere and action with some dreadful stuff in between. To be fair, when it works it works well. By the end of the story I was just about prepared to be generous and give The Cave three stars. Then came the final coda, a cliched ending that was not only predictable but also telegraphed. At that point I lost any remaining shred of sympathy for the writers.
Overall The Cave is a bit of a mess. The good bits are really good, however too much of it is simply poor.