Author: David Medsker

“City of Ember” feels like a live-action version the video game “Myst,” with George Orwell at the helm. It’s a series of riddles and hiding-in-plain-sight clues, covered in a suffocating layer of totalitarianism. Pretty heavy material for a movie aimed at ‘tweens, yes, but the “Harry Potter” movies have proven that the kids can handle heavy. Besides, the movie’s adults-never-listen-to-kids angle is catnip to a teenager.

The movie begins by explaining the origins of the Builders, who have created the underground city of Ember in order to preserve mankind after a natural disaster has made life on the surface uninhabitable, and given its citizens instructions to return above ground in 200 years’ time. The plans are contained in a time-locked case, handed down from mayor to mayor, though none of the mayors knows what’s in the box. One of the mayors dies before he hands off the case, however, and it is lost in what ultimately becomes the closet of 12-year-old mayoral descendant Lina Mayfleet (Saoirse Ronan). By this time, the 200-year window has long passed, the city’s supplies are dwindling and its hydro-electric generator is on the verge of breakdown. Lina teams up with her friend Doon (Harry Treadaway) to find a way to save the city of Ember, but the treacherous, and surprisingly well-fed Mayor Cole (Bill Murray) would prefer that the citizens of Ember remain in the dark, as it were.

If this doesn’t get accolades for its art direction, it would be a crime; the set pieces are both gorgeous (the overhead lights throughout the city) and a tad creepy (everything else), and as cliché as it sounds, the city is as integral a character to the story as any of the citizens that live in it. If only screenwriter Caroline Thompson had paid as much attention to the details in the story as director Gil Kenan (he directed the super-creepy “Monster House”) did to the set design, we’d have something truly special. Much time is spent on larger-than-life creatures that live in the Unknown Regions, and in the end it means…absolutely nothing. Maybe they’re saving it for the DVD.

Ronan is turning out to be quite the actress; she nails her American accent, and has one of those faces where you can see her looking through whatever problem she’s facing. Expect the “next Jodie Foster” talk to start any minute now. It’s hilarious, though, that they cast Harry Treadaway as her friend Doon. I last saw him playing Joy Division drummer Stephen Morris in “Control,” and a quick IMDb search confirms that he’s twice the age that he’s playing here. (Insert your own Gabrielle Carteris joke here.) Murray was a good choice for Mayor Cole, since Cole is more conniving than physically intimidating (though his gut will get more laughs than his words). Tim Robbins doesn’t get much to work with as Doon’s father, but Martin Landau is a hoot as the narcoleptic pipe worker Sul.

After years of wallowing in the lowest common denominator, children’s movies – live-action children’s movies, at least – are slowly but surely improving. Last year’s “The Seeker” and “Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium” were not great, but they were a step in the right direction. This year, between “City of Ember” and “The Spiderwick Chronicles,” the bar is raised even higher. How refreshing to see standards going up for a change.

It seems laughably apologetic to give a studio credit for not royally screwing something up – hey now, that wasn’t completely awful! Well done, gents – but to be fair, there are a number of ways that the live action “Cinderella” could have gone horribly wrong. It could have been directed by one of those ‘that guy’ directors, rather than Kenneth Branagh, who made sure the movie had style and class, by jove. The script, by Chris Weitz (“About a Boy”), could have painted with a broad brush, rendering the wicked Tremaine women cardboard cutouts, and the prince a brain-dead trophy husband. “Cinderella” does none of these things, but more importantly, the movie reinforces the idea that kindness is always the better option, even when it’s not the easiest one. This may still be a fairy tale, but that is a great message for young girls and boys, and even better, the story is crafted in such a way that makes Cinderella not so much a lottery winner as a young woman making smart choices, honoring her family, and taking responsibility for her fate, by being kind. I can’t stress that last part enough.

Ella (Lily James) lives a simple but happy life with her loving, modest parents. Following the death of her mother (Hayley Atwell), though, Ella’s life takes a dreadful turn when her father (Ben Chaplin) marries the widow Lady Tremaine (Cate Blanchett), and must share the house with her and her awful daughters Anastasia (Holliday Grainger) and Drisella (Sophie McShera). The aspiring social climbers treat Ella like a servant when her father travels, and when Ella receives word that her father has fallen ill and died on his most recent trip, Ella – now dubbed Cinderella by the stepsisters when they see her with soot on her face (cinders on Ella, ha ha) – rides to the forest to escape her misery.

While in the forest, she happens upon a group of royalty hunting an elk, and she shames one of them, a handsome young man named Kit (Richard Madden) for doing so, unaware that Kit is a prince, and heir to the throne. The two do that period’s version of the Meet Cute (circling each other on horses, apparently) and are clearly attracted to each other – both mind and body – but Ella doesn’t tell Kit her name or anything about her, out of fear that he will be disappointed once he discovers that she’s a commoner. On the contrary, Kit is so smitten with Ella that he refuses the king’s (Derek Jacobi) insistence that he marry “up” (read: a princess in a larger empire) in order to grow their kingdom. Kit decides to throw a royal ball, and opens it to the public with the hope that Ella will attend. Ella plans to, but the Tremaine women see to it that she cannot. Good thing Ella has a fairy godmother (Helena Bonham Carter) to save the day, especially considering that up to that moment, she didn’t know she had one.

The casting of this movie was genius, at times in unconventional ways. Blanchett has played villains before (“Hanna,” for one), but more often than not it is Carter playing the baddie, which is what makes her appearance here as the fairy godmother such a pleasant surprise. (It sure beats the hell out of her reprising her role as the Mad Queen in “Alice in Wonderland.”) Blanchett is more than capable of wringing every last drop of cruelty out of Lady Tremaine’s words – even if her daughters look like they were cast with Carter in mind as their mother – and she does just that. James, meanwhile, has a harder job here than it may seem; she has to play nice in the face of the boorish vanity of her stepfamily, and even when they’re at their most appalling, she keeps her cool. Ella is steadfast and hopeful, but shattered. James strikes the perfect balance between the two extremes.

And the dress she wears to the ball – wow. It’s ridiculously early, but I’m confident that this movie will win next year’s Academy Award for Best Costume Design for that dress alone. It is simply stunning.

The truly terrifying thing about Anastasia and Drisella is how relatable they are. There are millions of girls in the country right now who act just like them (delusional, fame-obsessed, overblown sense of self-importance, completely lacking in empathy), and indeed one wonders if Weitz wrote them that way to serve as a warning to young girls that they will run into Anastasia and Drisella several times in their lives, and that this is how to break them. Weitz also handled Ella’s relationship with the mice perfectly. They can’t talk – because that would be silly – but they can almost talk, and they clearly understand her. Some early exposition even explains how that’s possible.

The movie hangs around longer than it should – they introduce a sub-villain and a Sinister Plan just when the movie should be hitting the finish line – and there is a fair amount of death, which may upset some younger kids (like, say, my 7-year-old son). Still, for a movie with a bulls-eye on its back the size of Canada—it’s a live action (1) remake (2) of a Disney princess movie (3), making it the Holy Trinity of ‘Hollywood is out of ideas’ projects, and therefore subject to terabytes of snark – “Cinderella” practices what it preaches by having courage, being kind, and exceeding all expectations.

After taking his groundbreaking motion capture technology to insane extremes in 2007’s “Beowulf,” it made sense that Robert Zemeckis would up the ante in his retelling of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” However, to say that he upped the ante here would be a grand understatement. The effects work here is far beyond a tech wizard showing off; it’s more like watching Zemeckis lose his mind. He seems so obsessed with what he can do with the FX that he doesn’t stop to consider whether he should.

Jim Carrey, in one of several roles, is Ebenezer Scrooge, a penny-pinching miser who lives a joyless existence until one Christmas Eve, when he receives a visit from his deceased business partner Jacob Marley (Gary Oldman). Marley warns him that he will be visited by three spirits representing Christmases from the past, present and future. They give Scrooge some long-overdue perspective on his selfish ways, and scare the bejeezus out of him in the process.

There is nothing wrong with the movie being a little menacing, of course. It’s a cautionary tale designed to inspire the reader to be a better person, and death is one heck of a motivator. This movie should be a little scary. (Take the horses of the Ghost of Christmases to Come. Red eyes, yikes.) However, what Zemeckis does with the ghost of Jacob Marley isn’t just scary; it’s disturbing, and for no good reason. Indeed, there are a lot of for-no-good-reason moments here, including a downhill skiing bit that is completely out of place with the movie’s overall tone.

There is also the issue of the motion capture technology itself. It still looks a little odd, and when Zemeckis has his characters do something extraordinary (the dance sequence featuring Bob Hoskins’ Mr. Fezziwig and his wife, for example), it looks glitchy. Carrey is relatively subdued as Scrooge, but completely unhinged as the Ghost of Christmas Present, who looks a little like Carrey when he dressed as Jim Morrison for the MTV Movie Awards. Oldman and Colin Firth, who plays Scrooge’s nephew Fred, fare better, but they don’t get enough screen time to make much of a difference. This is Carrey and Zemeckis’ show, sometimes for better but ultimately for worse.

You can see what Zemeckis likes about motion capture technology; if only he knew when to stop. With “Beowulf” and “A Christmas Carol,” he got so drunk with the possibilities that he wound up putting the cart before the horse, and story took a back seat to visuals. No good will ever come of that, and this movie is no exception.

Little-known fact: Alfonso Cuarón is The Man. And chances are, no matter what kinds of movies you prefer, you’ve seen The Man’s work. When he’s not making a Mexican road movie (“Y Tu Mama Tambien”) or reinterpreting Dickens (1998’s “Great Expectations”), you might find him making a movie about some British boy wizard “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” this writer’s personal favorite in the series to date). Amazingly, Cuarón walked away from the “Potter” series after making just one movie, though you’ll forgive him for doing so once you’ve seen the dazzling “Children of Men,” a brutal futuristic tale of life, interrupted.

The story takes place in London in the year 2027. The human race has become infertile, and the resulting effect on society has led to worldwide chaos. England, if the media is to be believed, is the last nation standing thanks to its being an island, but they are now faced with an overwhelming immigration problem. The country is a police state, and refugee camps abound. Ironically, none of this means anything to former activist Theo (Clive Owen), until his ex-wife Julian (Julianne Moore), who now works with one of the many underground immigrant movements, needs help in transporting a Jamaican girl named Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitley) out of the country and to the group the Human Project, which may or may not exist (their headquarters is on a boat in the ocean), without drawing attention. Julian’s reason: Kee is pregnant, and Julian fears that the government will dispose of her rather than use her to look for a way to cure mankind.

This is a special kind of futuristic sci-fi, one that is both modern (the billboards on the buses are digital video, and new technology still flourishes) and decimated (the streets look like Nazi-occupied Europe during WWII), which stands in stark contrast to the slick but dreary backdrops in movies like “Blade Runner” and “V for Vendetta.” Cuarón seems to be at home in both worlds, and proves it with a couple of massive one-take shots that are nothing short of spellbinding (to say more would spoil the fun).

Perhaps the most shocking thing about “Children of Men” is how the story morphs from a “Vendetta”-style fable about oppressive government to a startlingly anti-political (and possibly pro-religious; I haven’t read P.D. James’ book, so I’m not exactly sure) parable about loving thy neighbor. The subject matter may be bleak, but it is not without hope, which is rather timely given the book debuted 14 years ago. But perhaps these are just the words of a man who laughed at Michael Caine playing an aging drug dealer (“Can you taste the strawberry?”) who’s listening to either “Ruby Tuesday” or raucous hip-hop. While we’re on the subject, monster propers go to the supervisor of the soundtrack, which features King Crimson, Jarvis Cocker, Deep Purple and, God help me for missing this one during the movie, Junior Parker covering the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows.”

My Best of 2006 list would look a hell of a lot different had I seen “Children of Men” before now (now being January 3, 2007). The movie was meticulously shot and, while not as emotionally engrossing as I would have liked, it is still wildly compelling. Perhaps most importantly, it raises the stakes for all concerned, including the Spielbergs of the world, in terms of what a drama, a sci-fi flick, and a period piece can and should be. Like I said, Alfonso Cuarón is The Man.

If there was a spectrum of animated films, where the witty, high brow Pixar movies were on one end and the broad, stunt-casted DreamWorks Animation films were on the other, “Chicken Little” would fall dead in the center. It has a fresh visual style and keeps the bodily function jokes to a minimum (like Pixar), but they also stuffed the movie to the gills with pop song after pop song (a la “Shrek”), as well as recruiting voice talent from “The Simpsons,” “Family Guy,” Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries, and even a couple of Pixar veterans. It’s not a masterpiece, but it is an awful lot of fun, and an encouraging first CGI step for a studio that’s been eating cartoon dust of late.

Zach Braff voices the title character (which technically makes him Rooster Little, but we digress), an extremely resourceful young chicken who sends the town into a panic when he rings the bell in the school tower and tells everyone the sky is falling. When he is unable to find the piece of the sky that he saw fall, his father Buck Cluck (Garry Marshall) is naturally mortified, and tries to tell Chicken Little to lay low for a while. Chicken tries to abide by his father’s wishes, and even joins the baseball team (Buck was a star player in his day). But just when it seems that things are okay between father and son, another piece of the sky falls (on Chicken’s head, no less), and Chicken Little soon discovers something far more sinister is afoot. The problem is that aside from best buds Abby Mallard, a.k.a. Ugly Duckling (Joan Cusack) and Runt of the Litter (Steve Zahn), no one believes him, including his father. In traditional Disney fashion, Chicken Little’s mother, who surely would believe her only son, is dead.

Their choice of subject matter, as old as it may be, is a wise one from an animation standpoint, because it allowed them to fill the supporting cast with every animal you can think of, led by female bully Foxy Loxy (Amy Sedaris). This gives the movie a truly unique feel, even though the town that these animals call home looks like any other human city (except for the cars, which have a boxy, Warner Brothers feel to them). The alien chase sequences (don’t ask; the less you know, the better) are pretty thrilling for G-rated fare; kids under 5 will probably be a little spooked by them, but it’s resolved in a pretty friendly way. The dialogue isn’t going to put Kevin Smith or Quentin Tarantino out of a job – in fact, the number of people who received story and dialogue credits is in the double digits – but at least the humor isn’t loaded with sexual innuendo. There are other ways to keep the adults interested, and the writers here, thankfully, knew that (ahem, DreamWorks).

But what on earth possessed them to stuff this movie with so many pop songs? Sure, music is one of Runt’s defining characteristics (one long stretch of his dialogue is the entire chorus to a Carole King song), but is the scene that’s scored by REM’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” actually better off because of the song’s presence? Is the dodgeball scene (which is laugh-out-loud funny) improved by the inclusion of “Gonna Make You Sweat”? It should also be written in stone that the only good use of a Spice Girls song is an ironic one, like when the bad guys in “Small Soldiers” used “Wannabe” to torture the protagonists.

In the end, though, Disney gets the right things right. The movie is alternately funny, exciting, and sweet, and the cast, while somewhat overexposed in the world of animation (Wallace Shawn, Harry Shearer, Adam freaking West), is well chosen just the same. Sure, they made some very calculated moves to ensure that the movie would appeal to as many people as possible, but for the most part their decisions were good ones. One can only hope that they attack their next project with a little more confidence, instead of second guessing what would make a successful animated movie. Come on, guys, you’re Disney. Don’t you remember how to do this?

My lovely wife wrote this one. She’s good.

“Charlotte’s Web,” the live-action adaptation of E.B. White’s classic 1952 children’s novel, features not one, not two, but three talented performers in roles they were born to play.

Exhibit A: Julia Roberts, herself a new mother, voices the role of Charlotte, the kindly grey spider who befriends Wilbur – a young pig destined for the smokehouse – and devises a plan to save his life. Despite their differences in size and species, Charlotte acts as a surrogate mother to the lonely piglet, and her soothing tones help assuage his fears about the realities of farm life. All the same, Charlotte is no June Cleaver; her buttery voice belies a boundless reservoir of spunk – and it is that quality, as much as her kindness and ingenuity, that endears her to audiences. Roberts embodies these traits effortlessly, and turns a bloodsucking creepy-crawly into a creature of true beauty.

Exhibit B: Steve Buscemi, the go-to guy for shady low-life types, voices Templeton the rat. He eats pig slop. He lives in a dank hole littered with pilfered garbage. He looks out for no one but himself. Who better to voice this role than the guy who “doesn’t tip,” and who once found himself in the business end of a woodchipper? Buscemi’s voice is just as wheedling and squirmy as the rodent he portrays onscreen, sight and sound melding into a CGI character that is as real as any other in the film. Saddled with a few groaner punch lines early on, Buscemi overcomes the material and fully inhabits his character’s filthy heart…even granting it a flickering hint of redemption.

Exhibit C: Dakota Fanning, youngest-ever member of the Academy, all-around box-office ass-kicker, and source of deep insecurity among actresses 10 and 20 years her senior, plays the key human character in the story, young Fern Able. It is Fern who first rescues Wilbur from an untimely death, convincing her father not to kill the runt of the litter, and it is Fern who comes to visit Wilbur at her uncle’s farm every day once the pig has grown too big to live in her own home. While Fern’s role in the book is more pivotal than it is in the movie, and in any case is not nearly as interesting as most of the non-human characters in the story, what’s important is this: it’s the lead onscreen role in one of the most beloved children’s books of all time. Dakota Fanning is the right age, the right gender, has a staggering level of box office clout – and is actually a good actress, to boot. Seldom do the stars align so perfectly.

And speaking of stars: the rest of the talent involved are no slouches, either. The pedigreed cast rounding out the barnyard includes such luminaries as Oscar winners Robert Redford and Kathy Bates, plus Oprah Winfrey as fussy goose Gussy. John Cleese brings his stiff upper lip to the role of Samuel, the sheep who would be more than just a follower, and Thomas Haden Church provides great comic relief as one of the few new characters in the movie, a crow named Brooks who is constantly thwarted in his quest for corn.

Ironically, despite their already talent-stacked deck, Paramount apparently pressured the film’s producers to land a “name” actor to voice the central role of Wilbur. Instead, they wisely went with Dominic Scott Kay…and the film is better off for it. Placing an unknown in the role of the youngster in jeopardy gives the character an extra layer of vulnerability – especially when surrounded, as he is, by older and more established talent. Kay gives Wilbur just the right mix of youthful exuberance, naiveté, and trepidation, and creates a character audiences can’t help rooting for – no matter how much they might love bacon.

When casting choices this magical are combined with an endearing, enduring classic, the result can only be described with a word that appears in one of Charlotte’s miraculous webs: terrific.

So let’s get this straight: in late-1920s Los Angeles, the young son of a working single mother disappears. Months later the police, desperate for a good headline because they’re corrupt and lazy, tell the mother they found her child, only it’s not her child. When she tells them they made a mistake, they force her to take the child and tell her that she’s imagining things. When she refuses to let it go, they lock her away in a psycho ward. At this point, some grisly details involving another juvenile case come into light, suggesting that the missing pieces to the story are even worse than the ones they’ve already uncovered.

Who the hell wants to see that movie?

It’s the cheapest form of manipulation there is – threatening the lives of children. If it were a political attack ad, they’d call it fearmongering, and that’s “Changeling” in a nutshell. The events behind the story may be true, and that is tragic, along with being a tad ridiculous (you’ve never seen such a one-sided movie in your life). Watching the dramatization of those events, though, isn’t electrifying, or gripping, or heart-wrenching, or any of those Oscar-friendly buzz words usually associated with this kind of movie; it’s miserable.

Angelina Jolie is the single mother, named Christine Collins, and when she’s called in to work on an off day, her son Walter (Gattlin Griffith) is not there when she comes home. Five months later, she is told that the police have picked up a boy in Illinois that matches Walter’s description, but when Christine goes to meet him at the train station – surrounded by reporters at the behest of a police department desperate to get some good ink – Christine tells the police that the boy is not her son and they, fearing public embarrassment, force to take the child anyway. Her primary dealings from there are with the extremely powerful LAPD Captain J.J. Jones (Jeffrey Donovan), and despite some rather substantial evidence proving this boy they found is not Walter, he chooses to vilify Christine as an unfit mother with mental problems. When Christine refuses to relent, Jones ships her off to a psycho ward as a Code 12 patient. It is here that she meets Carol Dexter (Amy Ryan), another Code 12 patient who shows her how to survive inside the nut house. Meanwhile, on the outside, local pastor and anti-corruption activist Gustav Brieglab (John Malkovich) is fighting to get Christine justice, while LA’s last good cop, Lester Ybarra (Michael Kelly), follows a tip on a missing child from Canada, and makes a shocking discovery.

This is every mother’s worst nightmare of a movie, which again begs the question: who on earth would pay good money to subject themselves to this kind of misery? Is there anything good to take from the experience? Meanwhile, the LAPD are so corrupt and blind to their egregious mistake that it’s like watching John Waters as the hypno-therapist in “Hairspray” (the original, not the musical remake), more cartoon than struggle against authority. The only way it could be more cartoonish is if Christine’s only hope for escape was to get Jones to say his name backwards.

Sure, director Clint Eastwood makes it look good (and sound good, as he scored the movie as well), and Jolie handles the whole Mother, Interrupted thing with the right balance of reserve and heartbreak, but that does not make “Changeling” any less insufferable. There is no feeling of relief or sense of justice when it’s all over; just exasperation that it took that much effort for common sense to prevail. There are also a couple key threads that are dropped in favor of poking the audience with a sharp stick (what about the neighbors that were supposed to check up on Walter, or the boy’s claim that the police coached him?), and when all is said and done – some 140 minutes later – “Changeling” is a damning indictment of the sexist conditions of a time that few people are alive today to remember. Perhaps it’s better that way.

God help us, we’re all the way down to the ‘switched bodies’ plot getting a raunchy makeover, as if anyone asked for that. To be fair, “The Change-Up” had the potential to be much better than it is, but the filmmakers clearly mistook raunchiness for a complete lack of restraint. Fools. The best raunch-coms are the ones that know those two ideas are not mutually exclusive.

Dave (Jason Bateman) and Mitch (Ryan Reynolds) have been friends since childhood, which might explain why there’s still a connection, if a bit tenuous, as they reach their late 30s. Dave is a successful lawyer with lovely wife Jamie (Leslie Mann) and three kids, while foul-mouthed Mitch gets baked all day and auditions for roles in bad movies. Dave envies Mitch’s freedom, while Mitch wants Dave’s success. After a night a booze-fueled fun, the two relieve themselves in a fountain, each wishing to be the other. The next morning, they get their wish, and quickly realize just how difficult each other’s life is. The more difficult aspect of the switcheroo, though, is finding out how their loved ones truly feel about them, not to mention how each honestly feels about the other.

This whole raunch-com thing has been fun, hasn’t it? The problem is that six years into the movement (we’re counting 2005’s “Wedding Crashers” as the one that started this), it’s all been done, and now everyone’s stooping to embarrassing lows to come up with something that no one else has done yet, without considering whether or not it’s a good idea. Like, say, having a baby shit directly into someone’s mouth….in the opening scene. The other problem with the humor is that it just doesn’t make sense. At one point, Mitch and Dave try to convince a skeptical Jamie of the switch, so Dave (as Mitch) tells a story that only he would know, only he chooses a story so embarrassing to Jamie that she slaps Mitch (as Dave) for betraying her trust. (Any husband will tell you that this would never happen.) Also, don’t you think it would occur to Mitch to tell Dave that the girl coming to screw his brains out is ten months pregnant? And is any grown-up so dense that they’d put infants on a kitchen counter next to the knife block? Lazy, lazy, lazy.

And that’s a pity, because the two leads are having a field day with the material. Jason Bateman, the hardest working straight man in show business, lets it all hang out here, and while Reynolds sells the Mitch character much better, it’s fun to see Bateman step outside of his comfort zone and act like, well, a douche. Reynolds, however, has the better role, because he gets the quick laughs up front as himbo Mitch and then inherits the far better character arc as trapped Dave. Leslie Mann plays the shrill harpy far too often for someone with her comedic abilities, and while Jamie spends most of the movie veering between ill-tempered and heartbroken, she gets a couple of chances to show her stuff (and breasts, which was surprising). Olivia Wilde arguably has the most fun, though, getting to play both business professional and bad girl while being herself the entire time.

David Fincher’s “Se7en” is one of the most disturbing thrillers of all time, and the main reason for that is because of what it doesn’t show; the movie knows that the audience will come up with something far worse than anything they could put on screen. “The Change-Up” would have greatly benefited from that mindset. Instead of showing everything, how about teasing the audience a little? To paraphrase Patton Oswalt, the majority of the present-day raunch-coms all about coulda, not shoulda (again, see: baby shitting in someone’s mouth). “The Change-Up” could have used a whole lot more shoulda.

It’s easy to tell when a second unit director or director of photography is making his directorial debut – Bruce Hunt, DP on the “Matrix” movies, please step forward – because everything looks fantastic, but it doesn’t mean anything. “The Cave” is such a movie. It was clearly a costly shoot, with a majority of the action taking place underwater, and James Cameron will tell you all about shooting underwater. To its credit, the underwater shots look nice. In fact, they’re stunning. But thanks to a script that looks like no human hands touched it at any point, those elegant diving shots are wasted. Thrillers aren’t terribly thrilling when you’re actually rooting for the monsters to knock the humans off.

The setup: a group of the prettiest divers you’ll ever meet are commissioned to explore a cave in the mountains of Romania that sits beneath the ruins of a church. It’s a deep drop, combined with a long tunnel, and no one is expecting to hear from them for twelve days. The divers are simply trying to graph the tunnels for research purposes, but soon discover that they have company in the form of a nasty bat/Alien hybrid. Their leader, Jack (Cole Hauser), survives an attack from one of the creatures, but the parasites in its blood stream infect Jack, giving him the acute sense of hearing the creatures have. The group is unsure whether they can trust him, and a group that was already having trouble standing up to these baddies now has to face off against each other as well.

None of this, of course, will matter to you, because it clearly didn’t matter to the filmmakers to create any characters worth giving a damn about. The character development, as it were, is laughable; the actors did not need to ask themselves what their character’s motives were, because it went no deeper than, “I’m a scientist,” “I’m arrogant,” or “I’m still trying to earn my brother’s respect, even if he’s turning into an Alien bat.” There are also a series of blind drops into rapids and ice caves (the hills of Romania, it appears, are both boiling hot and ice cold) that should have turned the group into bags of bones. Remarkably, few sustain lingering injuries.

It’s maddening to think that movies like this continue to get made these days. How does this get past the pitch phase, especially when there is not a single original idea in the premise? This has all been done before, and better, in “Alien,” “Predator,” “Pitch Black,” and even “Anaconda.” If Hollywood is truly eager to find out why they’re suffering such a horrible slump, this would be a good place to start.

It’s shocking that this movie didn’t find a larger audience, given that it’s the “Facebook movie” that its users can best relate to. A New York photographer begins to receive correspondence from a young girl in Michigan, and soon is in tight with her family on Facebook. It is here that he meets the girl’s older sister, and…well, we really can’t say anything more than that, but let’s just say that roughly two dozen “Wow” moments follow. Unfortunately, in this post-“I’m Still Here” world, the nagging question of whether the movie’s events are real lingers over everything that happens after the 25-minute mark. (The filmmakers and its star admit that it looks a little too perfect, but insist that they simply got lucky and the story is 100% true.) This does not distract from what is a truly fascinating story, even if it does play its hand a bit too early (again, at the 25-minute mark). We’d say more, but really, this is one you just have to experience for yourself.