Sigh!

Rating: 3/10 (30 July 2006)

I am genuinely mystified as to why this movie draws such high ratings. I'm also really annoyed with people who just carelessly give a movie a "10" rating, as if this movie is Citizen Kane. Come ON, people, show some friggin' sense of proportion, will you?!
There's nothing remotely original about The Descent. The cheesy shock effects are the same as in every other horror movie, and can be seen coming a mile away. The premise is essentially exactly like all those underwater movies with a monster, combined with those backwood flicks about monstrously inbred hicks. Here we have some cavemen who never got out of the caves and evolved to live underground (when we saw the first one, I yelled "It's Gollum!!"). This is in North America. Which wasn't populated by humans until the Native Americans crossed the Bering Strait some ten or twelve thousand years ago. There were never any actual cavemen in North America. So this part doesn't make sense.
And the crawlers' not being about to hear or smell the girls when standing right next to them, or even stepping on them?! That was idiotic.
Not much else in the film makes sense, either. Why do Sarah's husband and daughter die in the beginning if not to make this a story about Sarah overcoming that trauma? But no, this is cynical European "realism", so nobody survives (in the original ending).
And poor beautiful Juno, who had an affair with Sarah's husband - and not just some casual thing but a deeply held love -, still loved Sarah and wanted to strengthen their friendship. But, noooo, the movie sends the message that Juno is an awful person who deserves to die for her heinous crimes. Shyeah right. How moronic.
And the six women. Hardly any character development at all. Hardly any sexy elements at all. With the introduction of Holly, the short-haired base jumper with an attitude, presented as "Juno's... protegé", wink-wink, I was sure this was supposed to be a lesbian thing, but apparently it was nothing of the sort. As someone else said, no sleaze factor at all. It was played straight all the way. Another sign of pretentiousness. The characters were extremely hard to tell apart. Two of them were sisters, but I'll be buggered if I can remember who. Juno and Sam were good-looking; the rest were nothing particular to look at.
Juno and Sarah made cool action chicks in the fight scenes towards the end, though. And the studio sets made for a very convincing and natural-looking cave system. But that's really the only good things I have to say about this movie.
3 out of 10.