A Nice Piece of Original Horror Storytelling

Rating: 8/10 (28 August 2006)

I write this in August of 2006, and unless this movie is total fluke, I anticipate to hear more of Neil Marshall. Good reviews and a nearby theater with decent parking lured me out to THE DESCENT and I'm glad I saw it. Despite an opening that too heavily resembled FINAL DESTINATION and it's offspring, this movie picks up a completely original concept and runs away with it. If you've seen the trailers or read most of the reviews, you already know it involved both getting stranded in a cave and monsters. What you can't anticipate is that it also bothers to invest in its characters enough to evoke something more like ALIEN and less like, well, anything less well done.
I've heard the British ending is more ambiguous than the American one. From what I've read (I'll spare you the spoiler) it's not so much ambiguous as it is unfinished. The American ending is more definitive, a much needed feature to a film so thrilling. When you're gasping for breath, you want to know it's all over, finally.
I walked out with my friends and we agreed (1) we had no interest in spelunking and that (2) picking apart certain logical fallacies in this movie was folly. Sit down, scare it up, and walk away thrilled, and yes, perplexed. There's a twist at the end, but it's not a "who lives and who dies" kind of twist. It's a bigger, moral dilemma, and an interesting choice for a genre so content with killing whomever it likes.