Sahara

Gee, this looks familiar..

 (First off, sorry about it being late.  School started, and other stuff happened.  Yeah, ok, I have no real excuse)

Yes, I have decided to review places now.  I never said I was just reviewing entertainment!  Well, the Sahara is extremely large.  And sandy.  It's in Africa.

Naw, I'm just screwing with you.  This is Sahara, the film.
It's based off the book of the same name, which it follows pretty closely, and it really shouldn't have.  I'll get into that later.

I guess the best way to start with the movie is the credits.  The camera moves around this incredibly crowded room, starting off with a wall covered in postcards, which introduce you to the characters and there history.  This sequence is fantastic, if a little long.

The plot of Sahara follows Dirk Pitt and Al Giordino, two childhood friends who joined the Navy and became Navy seals together, and are currently working for the National Underwater and Marine Agency, or NUMA.  No, I'm not going to do it.  I'm not going to type the lyrics for the numa numa song.  I have SOME standards.

Anyway, these two are off to find a lost Confederate ironclad ship, the USS Texas, which was rumored to have been wrecked in the Sahara.  Pretty nice plot, right?  It's just two guys looking for a wreck.

Well, there's another plot tacked onto the side, which is obviously a afterthought, an afterthought that isn't needed.  It follows an World Health Organization, aka, WHO doctor.

No, not that one.

Her name is Eva Rojas, and her only point in this entire film is to have boobs.  She is investigating a mysterious illness that is spreading across Northern Africa.  Along the way, she gets attacked by some men, and even get ambushed by the military at one point.  Can't really tell you more, but it turns out the if she doesn't stop the disease, it will kill the entire world.  It might sound like she does alot, but all of this is actually figured out by Dirk.

The two plots have no place being in the same room together, let alone the same script.  Well, I'll go on to why later.

Well, might as well move onto the characters.  Dirk is a rather badass archaeologist, and is also a really cool character.  Eva does have a personality, but it's easily the weakest in the film.  What really saves the movie is Al.  Al, is hilarious.  He's the best character in sidekick history.  Like Dirk, he is also a badass, but he's also funny, and he actually has a point in the plot!

There are also two antagonists, Yves Massarde and General Kazim.  Yves is a generic evil businessmen, who is, depending on the plot, truly evil, or just stupid.  General Kazim is your generic African dictator.  If Yves had coherent writing, he would be a good villain, because in some cases it's shown he's not really evil.  It's either Kazim ordering him to do something, or he panics.

We can't stop here!  This is bat country!

I realize that I might have given the opinion that the writing is awful if the plot is so bad.  It isn't.  The dialogue is pretty good and funny, and the scenes are well written.  The problem is that the plot of the book is just terrible.  Hell, the book had a sub-plot that the movie didn't include was that the USS Texas had a Union prisoner, who was Abraham Lincoln.  Do I even have to tell you how that's stupid?  I can hold my disbelief enough so that a Ironclad can, completely by accident, sail into Africa, and up into the Sahara Desert, but not for the president being captured and no one noticing that he has been replaced by an actor!  That is how stupid it is!

The action is good too, having Al and Dirk doing some awesome, and at times hilarious moves.

I like this movie, even if the plot is badly written.  So, if it's good, why don't you know about it?  Well, it cost 160$ million dollars, and it made 100$ million. Inception, which was released 5 years later, cost the same amount, 100 of which was marketing.  So, why was the cost so high?  Well, the writer of the Dirk series of books, which includes Sahara, sued the film, probably because it was, you know, written well.

Spoilers: The "disease" is in fact chemicals in the river, which has a lot of metals in it.  Also, the records of a city on the mouth of the river, they have a entry where a strange ship sailed up it, and people started dying.  Ha!  You actually fell that red herring!  No, really, the Ironclad has nothing to do with it, the poisoning of the river is caused by a new solar powered chemical disposal plant.  So, why was it called ship of the dead?  I mean, it could be coincidence, a plague hit at the same time as the ship did, but it would be nice if Dirk presented that theory.  Anyway, Dirk, Al and Eva meet a group of people who are fighting Kazim, where they find cave paintings of an Ironclad.  Wait...Why didn't the freedom fighters know about this, if it was in their village?  And why was it in cave paintings?  Now, I have no idea about the history of Africa, but it's a pretty good bet that 150 years ago they didn't live in caves.  Here's the best part, it turns out that 150 years ago, a river was in the Sahara.  Yeah, while the Sahara was a lush forest in the past, it was before the ice ages.  SO, either that's one REALLY old ship, or the author wrote himself into a corner.  Dirk claims that the river  is now underground.  Well, first of all, where did it go?  Dirt can only hold so much, and water can only go through so much dirt.  And if the river did go underground, it would need a cave system, something which the Sahara isn't known for.  Unless the cave system the river was in was extremely deep, then the Sahara desert wouldn't be a desert anymore, which would probably leave it out of reach of chemical seepage. Anyway, I've only NOW finished with the Ironclad plot, and it's already so long that I can't really go into the chemical plant plot, but believe me, it's worse.

If you think you can withstand the plot, then I suggest you watch this movie.  It's really good.