The Descent

The Descent is a tale about a collective of friends (all femmes) who meet yearly to indulge in adventures dealing with the great outdoors. From white water rafting to spelunking.  Pretty cool if you ask me, and all of the girls had the physique needed to make such a premise plausible.

The movie starts after a successful trip ends with tragedy for one of the girls as she loses her entire family in a car accident. Scarred emotionally and physically, the woman tries to move on by attending the next year’s trip which was to be a climb through a popular cave with her girlfriends. The scenes that led up to the actual climb into the cave were very lukewarm for me, with an ineffective back and forth between the girls to try and explain to the audience the differing personalities and skills each one of them possessed. Two alpha femmes are shown as the planners for the trip and the team is led to the cave where the true movie actually begins. The climb down is full of conversation, fears and accomplishments until someone notices something moving in the darkness… then all hell breaks loose, pitting the women against an unknown horror within a strange cave that they mistakenly thought had been tamed.

Synopsis
The movie in itself was a bit boring, the lame attempt to reveal the nature of each woman was very quick and uninteresting. Aside from the main three women meant to carry the movie, the other cast of characters were easily forgotten as soon as the camera left them, hinting almost immediately that they would be owned quickly by the beasts. The painful girl chat and cat fighting was a bit much to sit through before the meat and bones of the movie presented itself, and I wish it had been carried out alot better.

The film did however change for the better when the first attack launched and the trip became one of survival. The femme fatale element made it likeable to me eventually but I wished I didn’t have to stomach a boring hour to get to it. The way it concluded was unnecessary cheese topping on an already shaky film and even though I went home smiling, it just wasn’t a great movie.

Conclusion
This film is worth a rental at best, just for curiousity’s sake. The shaky directing and the subpar writing will keep it off my collection shelf, but I do not regret seeing it, it was entertaining to say the least.