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The Descent Two Review
The Descent 2
The Descent (2005) was one of the surprise success stories of the year: a masterpiece of suspense which, along with director Neil Marshall’s Dog Soldiers (2002) helped put a ‘peaceful’ British horror film scene back on the map. And so we come to 2009 and to a surprise Descent sequel, this time directed by the editor of the original film, Jon Harris.
The reason a sequel is surprising dwells in the fact that The Descent had two different endings. For the US market, the main character Sarah successfully escaped the cave complex. However for us more dismally-minded Brits the escape was just a delusion and, as the credits roll, we’re sure Sarah is still trapped underground where she’s about to become brunch for the humanoid cave-dwellers. The Descent 2 takes for its starting point the US film ending. Sarah (again convincingly played by Shauna Macdonald) emerges, bloodied and traumatised, from a cave opening and stumbles into a road where she is picked up by a local and taken to hospital. Meanwhile, a rescue operation is underway when the original group of cavers are missed. Sarah has little time to recuperate before she is the subject of a police investigation, then strong-armed into accompanying her own rescue team back into the caves.
In many ways the sequel is a retelling of the first film, because although Sarah knows what to expect, she ain’t tellin’: a group of unsuspecting cavers end up in unfamiliar territory and are attacked by the carnivorous ‘crawlers’. Where the sequel differs most markedly is in its pace. The first Descent moved slowly and introduced the creature-feature aspect as a surprise after around an hour of very literal claustrophobia, but understandably this approach would not work all over again. Therefore, what we have is the disposal of slow-building tension and in its place more creatures and more grisly manoeuvres, almost from the get-go. The make-up on the creatures has also been altered to make them more individualised and more carnivorous in appearance, so that we have hordes of predatory creatures generating gallons of gore.
Once you adjust to the change of pace, you can enjoy this as a straightforward modern horror movie - but as with nearly all fast-moving modern horror, there is an over-reliance on the use of noisy jump cuts and predictability about when and where the creatures will pop up on screen. ‘Jump out of your skin’ moments in a horror film are much more effective in smaller doses, whereas in The Descent 2, they are frequent enough to become expected. Otherwise, the film is well-shot and although the sense of deep descent into the earth is not as developed here as in the original, the illusion of being underground is maintained, while the actors playing the crawlers do a sterling job of appearing at ease in treacherous territory. What the film really needs, as the second encounter with these creatures, is more plot exposition - even if a very little - as the only suggestion that anyone knows anything about them comes too late to make a great difference to our understanding of them. This stops the film really delivering anything additional to the first Descent.
The Descent 2 is a very different creature to the first - more savage and more relentless, even where this necessitates great plot-related leaps of faith and sacrifices the level of characterisation which was so fundamental to the first film, simply in order to dash us along. As a gore film it delivers, but as the second part of an intriguing story, perhaps the director’s wish to take the audience back to the caves at the expense of some of the plot elements which made the first film so successful casts a shadow over this still eminently watchable horror film.
Review by Miss K