OK, there was a time when I was moderately interested in seeing The Cave, an under-the-earth monster movie that was suspiciously moved from a spring release date earlier this year to an upcoming August 26th one, instead.
Even so…monsters. Really, that’s enough to grab my interest right there, especially since I don’t see a spooky ghost kid in sight. (Been a lot of them lately, it seems.)
So a commercial came on for it last night, and I turned away so I wouldn’t see anything I shouldn’t (and which they surely would be dumb enough to show me anyway). And…my precautions were in vain. Looking away didn’t preempt my hearing a major plot twist from apparently about halfway through the movie being blown in one sentence.
This provided several more reasons to think the movie will suck. First, the ‘twist’ is incredibly stale. Second, it’s no longer much of a twist if you reveal it in the friggin’ TV ads! Third, I’m not even sure why they’d do so. When they blew the “I see dead people” thing for The Sixth Sense, it was a novel plot device that drew a huge audience to come see the movie. In other words, it might have been a detriment to the film proper, but it made a lot of sense from a marketing standpoint.
The twist featured in the commercial for The Cave, however, is pure boilerplate, and does nothing other than confirm my suspicions that the film will be another paint-by-numbers loser.
Having more or less given up on the film by that point, I watched the rest of the commercial, and saw a) way too much of the monster(s), and b) saw what is obviously supposed to be a big shock moment (several, actually, but one in particular), meaning it won’t be shocking anymore, and besides, it was ripped off from Deep Blue Sea, which again doesn’t fill me with confidence about the people who made this one. Oh, and the monsters seem to be (sigh) CGI.
Remember Alien? The ads featuring the screeching, pounding sound and elliptical flashes of the film that gave you a sense of its flavor without blowing nearly anything about it? All The Cave had to do was tell us…Cave…Monsters. That’s it. Everything else just lessens our ability to be surprised by and enjoy the film. And in this case (as in so many others), actually lets us know that this isn’t a movie we should be getting very excited about. Good promotional campaign, putzes.
Thanks for saving me the $10, folks.
