And Australian director Alister Grierson takes full advantage of his surroundings, capturing wide-angle shots of the vast scenery to drive home the hollowness and escape-free reality of the caves. Claustrophobic intensity is all but guaranteed, and the fact that Sanctum was shot on location in Australia lends authenticity to the action.

If simply read on paper, the plot sounds like a no-brainer. While within the Esa-ala’s depths, a massive storm floods the caves, trapping the team beneath the surface and setting into motion your basic survival-against-insurmountable-odds tale.

Under his watch are his teenage son, Josh ( Rhys Wakefield), his financier, Carl ( Ioan Gruffudd), and a handful of poorly developed and interchangeable colleagues with no distinguishing characteristics. The crew is led by Frank Maguire ( Richard Roxburgh), a highly respected diving expert who’s both fearless and stubborn. A group of underwater divers heads into the South Pacific’s Esa-ala Caves, hoping to conquer one of the world’s most notoriously dangerous underground terrains.

Instead of Dances With Wolves, Sanctum brings to mind Neil Marshall’s great 2005 horror film The Descent, minus any cave-dwelling, and homicidal, bat-like humanoids. Much like Avatar, Sanctum looks great yet feels lifeless. Well shot and immersive in setting, the cave-diving-gone-wrong adventure flatlines due to a pedestrian screenplay and bottom-of-the-barrel acting. The same exterior-over-interior issue pervades the man’s latest project, Sanctum, which Cameron executive produced. Rather than push the storytelling in the same ways as he did the production’s effects work, Cameron seemingly devoted less attention to the writing and basically cranked out Dances With Wolves: The Ferngully Edition. For all the technical accolades and financial spoils showered upon James Cameron’s Avatar, there remains one inconvenient truth that’ll forever hinder the film’s legacy: Cameron’s script for the record-setting blockbuster is just too damn generic.

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