A real Let down

Rating: 3/10 (22 February 2019)

I'd heard that this movie was "not like other horror movies".
Well, It kind of is (like them).
It annoys me when these kinds of movies try to milk empathy from the viewers by showing us that people are doing the whole nuclear family thing, which is swell, but I'd rather find empathy for them by actually having some characterization. On this note, once the movie begins properly there's a tragedy and it has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. People love to quote "we all lost something that day" but that's not the same as it having any real consequence.
And do they just let the tragedy speak for itself and hint at the hurting with visual clues? You should be so lucky. And what is the deal with those hospital lights going out one by one? The crux of horror may be mystery but there is a difference between being mysterious and just making no sense.
So we get "one year later" AND "Appalachian Mountains, USA". In case you confused them with the Appalachian mountains in Slovenia. And here come the girls... Now women are great. I love to see women do everything men can do. But please do not make a mainly female movie if you're going to make them all one dimensional and forgettable. No, Juno was not a formidable character. That was an informed attribute. I had no sense of character, no sense of relationship beyond that they tolerate each other. And we get five minutes of them drivelling on. I believe a man can write memorable and believable female characters. Women are just like people after all. But no.
Before they even get to the cave you get a bunch of crows. After they get to the cave there's a swarm of bats jumping out at us. This is the level of freshness we can expect. It even does my least favourite thing for a movie to do: have a dream jump scare. Something shocking happens and then she wakes up. I don't care if it's demonstrating her emotional state. It's a cheap scare and only exploits something redundant to the story anyway.
So now we're in the cave (and expect a couple more character-gets-scared-but-it's-just-a friend-surprising-them moments). They don't do anything to draw attention to symbolism of spelunking or make it seem like some grand thing. They're just doing it. Apparently the writer thought he was being different by building up to showing the antagonists but all he's really doing is shoving in filler. Like people who give the impression they have something to say by taking forever to say nothing.
The pacing of this movie is just all over the place. it doesn't building up, it just stalls. it makes a development and I feeling like it's almost no big deal. I didn't get any of the groundwork on these characters and their motivations and relationships to really believe they could all get into such an unfortunate and stupid situation. A good writer can pull off an infeasible situation but they would put in the work, which this movie does not.
The rest of the movie is a whirl of screaming and rock fragments with all the scenes blurring into one. The monsters...they had nothing to do with how they got lost. This movie has way too much going on. I hate the creature design. It's just uninspired. They really expect you believe they are perfectly adapted to their surroundings but they can't smell them? Are you serious?
The Descent is a movie that tries to be "not like the American horror" by taking shortcuts to compensate for its lazy writing and cheap scares. People appearing scared does not equal horror.
And God the ending ticked me off. I saw the British version. It just does not respect its audience. What was I supposed to take away from this? What was the point of the car crash?