I didn’t have high hopes for "The Descent" but out of the selections available to me at the time it seemed like the best bet. It’s a good thing I didn’t have my hopes up. I should note that some have considered elements of my plot description to be spoilers. I personally feel like this is barely more than you can get out of the trailers and is important to people curious about the movie. Still, I hate unexpected plot spoilers so I want to throw out this caution.

Dealing with the loss of her family Sarah gets together with some of her friends to enjoy an outdoor adventure: a little light spelunking to get her mind off life. Since most of the group is used to extreme sports nobody takes the trip seriously until a collapsing passageway cuts them off from the surface. Being trapped underground is the least of their worries when they discover they aren’t alone down here. Something lives in the dark in a lair of bone.

There are many things that are ambiguous about this movie. That can be good or bad depending on what you want out of a movie. I enjoy ambiguity when it’s done right. It’s one reason I like Phillip K. Dick movies. Ray Bradbury does a great job with it as well. Alfred Hitchcock was the master. Neil Marshall has a long way to go.

"The Descent" is so ambiguous that it’s unsatisfying which is made worse by other poorly done elements. I have been told I should see the sequel to flesh out the story and may revisit my review if my viewpoint changes at all. (Edit: it hasn't.) One potentially good dichotic element that I didn’t initially consider is that this isn’t a story about a group’s descent into earth as much as it’s Sarah’s descent into madness. This viewpoint is more satisfying, especially at the end, and it helps with some of the plot holes, however it’s still not strong enough to make this a good movie.

The creatures, for example, clearly hunt above ground, yet they are extremely poorly equipped hunters considering the kind of prey they’re supposedly bringing down. There’s no way they would be able to kill large game without casualties, and yet none of the creatures have been seen by living human beings (meaning no carcasses found in the woods, no traces of any kind that we or the characters hear about which continues to hold true in the sequel). In addition to that, the number of animal and human skeletons (translating into them being missing) would have to at least lead to legends about the region. The area is popular enough to have a maintained road close by so a lack of human traffic couldn’t explain it.

Are these things that point to more than a surface explanation of the events or just things that the director didn’t consider? It’s hard to say (Edit #2: This is answered definitively in the sequel). Neither idea fully explains all the details. (Some of these questions are addressed in the sequel though still not to a level that I found satisfying).

How about the faithfulness or lack thereof of Sarah’s husband? Some say he was a cheater. Considering that does help explain some of Sarah’s actions, but it’s such an ambiguous point that I didn’t initially consider it as something that could be a factor in Sarah’s actions. In true, mindless movie-junkie fashion there are fans that say only a moron could miss the “obvious” connection, so I’m going to quit my job and apply for mental disability subsidies because I evidently can’t match the mental prowess of the viewers that took every look and action in the most negative way possible.

Having seen the movie again and having watched for this element I have to admit that I should have picked up on it the first time, but I guess that just further goes to show how the story failed to pull me in. Actually, the main reason I didn’t catch the adultery possibility at first was because of the poor sound design. Some of the dialogue is difficult to make out thanks to the weak mix quality. If I hadn't been watching it with someone else that had wanted to see it I would have never had the interest to revisit it to catch those finer details. I have been content to read a few message board posts to help me gain enough understanding to write a half-decent movie review.

That leads me to my next point, poor characters. I wasn’t completely disinterested in the characters. Sarah is a good one and the actress is good. I also rather liked Juno and her portrayal. Some of the others aren’t quite so good. Beth, I think her name is, the brunette that’s with the other two in the very beginning, is terrible. I don’t think any other the others are particularly bad, they are just poorly established. You’ve got a bunch of average height white girls introduced all at the same time. For the first part of the movie they’re each in different outfits each time we see them, sometimes with headgear on top of that, so unless you’re really paying close attention any distinction between them is tough.

Now, you might be thinking that I’m being too picky. After all, this is just a movie about a bunch of people getting slaughtered underground. If that’s all it takes for you to enjoy a movie then we're not going to see eye to eye on all our movie preferences. However, tension and danger with good characters and an intriguing story is something I can get excited about. This fails on the latter two points. The bottom line is that the poor character introductions and development at the beginning made most of the first few scenes boring. That made it difficult to pick up any of the more subtle potential plot points (assuming there really is something there to pick up on without having to be fanatical enough to watch the movie over and over) which greatly affects the effectiveness of the rest of the story.

The movie isn’t a complete wash, though. It does actually create tension very well. The sense of claustrophobia is strong, and the feeling of being trapped with the lethal creatures is great. The problem is that other than those individual tense moments there’s not much to write home about.