Cave
The the story is fascinating, the drawings are gorgeous, the 3-D is spectacular, but the movie... well, I was disappointed.
The movie, of course, is Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Werner Herzog's semi-documentary about the cave in France filled with 30,000- year-old drawings of animals.
Everything you've heard about the artistry of the drawings and the immersive feeling that the 3-D process brings to this tour of the Chauvet Cave is true. So far, so good.
My gripe is that the movie feels 30 minutes too long. There are the mandatory talking head sequences with scientists, but that's OK. I was more annoyed by the way many of the sequences were essentially repeating the views of the drawings, maybe panning left to right or up and down rather than what was done earlier. It seemed like those times on the evening news when the station has a 15-second clip of a house fire but 30 seconds of commentary. They just run the clip over again.
And then there's the goofy postscript that starts with a shot of a nuclear reactor in France and ends with some philosophical mumblings about albino crocodiles. Sorry Werner, you lost me there.
But despite its shortcomings this is a film you really should see. Walk inside a 32,000 year old art museum that you in reality are forbidden from entering. It's worth your time.
