A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Saturday, October 25, 2025

The Descent (Neil Marshall, 2005)

Shauna Macdonald in The Descent

Cast: Shauna Macdonald, Natalie Mendoza, Alex Reid, Saskia Mulder, MyAnna Buring, Nora-Jane Noone, Oliver Milburn, Molly Kayl, Craig Conway. Screenplay: Neil Marshall. Cinematography: Sam McCurdy. Production design: Simon Bowles. Film editing: Jon Harris. Music: David Julyan.

Neil Marshall's The Descent is notorious for having two endings, one for American audiences and a darker, more ambiguous one for the rest of the world. Neither ending, it seems to me, is satisfactory, but the choice itself points out the difficulty with genre films: What sort of conclusion do you put on a movie that has potential spinoffs lurking in its plot? Structurally, The Descent reflects the influence of sequelitis. As a claustrophobe, I was suitably terrified by the film when it looked like it was going to be an exciting and scary survival adventure. But then, midway, The Descent turns into a monster movie, and at that point it became "just a movie" to me: actors in makeup on obvious sound stage sets. I also preferred the movie when it seemed that there were going to be real characters in it, but then Marshall fails to provide distinct personalities for each of the six women who brave the adventure. Four of them fall by the way as the hero (Shauna Macdonald as Sarah) and the villain (Natalie Mendoza as Juno) battle each other along with the threatening creepers. We know Sarah is the hero because she has previously suffered a terrible loss, just as we know Juno is the villain because she's an adrenaline junkie likely to put them in danger. Skillfully made, and undeniably involving, The Descent sadly falls into genre clichés. 

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