I appreciate what The Descent tries to do. It's shot on a set and not one time would I have ever thought that had I not checked. I don't know shit about "caving" (as they call it in the movie), but there weren't a bunch of scenes that screamed "I don't think that's how that works" The acting is fine and although the gore was wildly unrealistic, I loved it. The Descent is an attempt to slow down and scale back what modern horror has become. What it actually is a very slow movie with uninteresting and indistinguishable characters that when it does pick up shoots by so fast you have no idea what's going on. It takes the first twenty minutes to get to the cave and they spend those twenty minutes on the most mind numbing attempt at character development. Beyond the main character, I can only identify two others and those are only because they are visibly different from everyone else. They try and give the main character a sob story, but we have no real reason to care. There is no emotional attachment to any of these characters. The actresses do great with what they are given, but everyone is just a generic horror movie character. There are little annoyances (the very bad CGI bats, the vast exaggeration of how bright bioluminescence can be in caves and horror movie logic), but the biggest one is the lack of continuity. They begin their descent into the cave with a rappel of a couple of hundred feet and there is no indication that they are going any way but straight. There are no further rappels or treks downward for the next ten minutes and then a character says they are two miles underground. The Hell you are. Did we jump forward a couple of hours because we never got that indication. There is no way that initial rappel was even close to ten-and-a-half thousand feet. How hard the crawlers are to kill varies immensely as does their ability to hear sounds. While I was expecting something more along the lines of As Above, So Below, I can appreciate a much more grounded story, but The Descent is kind of boring. I don't care who lives and who dies and beyond a particularly claustrophobic scene in the first quarter, I never really felt any tension. I was very bored the first twenty minutes and although it picks up, the pacing is nuts with far too many frenetic scenes followed by lulls. As much as I loved the setting, I was never able to care about the story or its characters. The do a reveal in the last ten minutes that totally misinterpreted because they expect us to remember stupid little things about these boring, plain characters. The Descent is decent, but it never rises above mediocrity.