On the plus side, this movie gets to the point where John wedges himself upside down in a cave pretty quickly. The problem is that this movie isn't really focused on the attempt to rescue him. There are bits here and there where they mention some of the technical challenges involved, and we see a couple different people interact with John, but we barely spend any time with those attempting the rescue, nor do we see much of their efforts to try and rescue him.
Instead, this movie takes that situation and builds a whole story around what John could have been imagining while stuck, and we learn about his childhood and relationship with his family, and about his Mormonism, and how he met his wife and wooed her.
This is more of a cheesy love story and tribute to John with a rescue as a backdrop. As a rescue/survival movie, this is one of the worst, if not the worst, that I've ever seen. The writing and acting are pretty bad, and way they go through all of these hallucinations is just poor movie making. This is a very amateurish movie, poorly made from pretty much every way you look at it unless you need a heartfelt, Lifetime movie about Mormon love.
Everyone is pretty much insufferable as they put John on this weird pedestal. There's a part in the movie where John is dating Emily, and she goes away for 4 months. It's not entirely clear to me how long they were dating before then, but it did not seem like very long. He was obsessed with her and needed her to be his wife. After she got back, he made this big show of proposing to her. She turned him down (rightly, given that it seemed like they hadn't been together that long), and it seemed to crush him. Apparently his family took her rejection of him (she did not break up with him, merely said no to the proposal) hard and vilified her. They wanted him to dump her and find someone else. He persisted, but gave himself a fairly short timeframe to try and convince her to marry him. I guess it worked. This whole thing came off pretty gross to me. I pretty much hated that family.
The ending is pretty terrible. I don't want to spoil it, but there's a whole Benjamin Button, cheesy watching over you nonsense to it all.
This is just a bad, bad movie that pretends to be one kind of movie but is actually something completely different. If you want a heartfelt Mormon tribute to this guy's life and aren't really interested in a rescue/survival movie, maybe this would work for you.
Instead, this movie takes that situation and builds a whole story around what John could have been imagining while stuck, and we learn about his childhood and relationship with his family, and about his Mormonism, and how he met his wife and wooed her.
This is more of a cheesy love story and tribute to John with a rescue as a backdrop. As a rescue/survival movie, this is one of the worst, if not the worst, that I've ever seen. The writing and acting are pretty bad, and way they go through all of these hallucinations is just poor movie making. This is a very amateurish movie, poorly made from pretty much every way you look at it unless you need a heartfelt, Lifetime movie about Mormon love.
Everyone is pretty much insufferable as they put John on this weird pedestal. There's a part in the movie where John is dating Emily, and she goes away for 4 months. It's not entirely clear to me how long they were dating before then, but it did not seem like very long. He was obsessed with her and needed her to be his wife. After she got back, he made this big show of proposing to her. She turned him down (rightly, given that it seemed like they hadn't been together that long), and it seemed to crush him. Apparently his family took her rejection of him (she did not break up with him, merely said no to the proposal) hard and vilified her. They wanted him to dump her and find someone else. He persisted, but gave himself a fairly short timeframe to try and convince her to marry him. I guess it worked. This whole thing came off pretty gross to me. I pretty much hated that family.
The ending is pretty terrible. I don't want to spoil it, but there's a whole Benjamin Button, cheesy watching over you nonsense to it all.
This is just a bad, bad movie that pretends to be one kind of movie but is actually something completely different. If you want a heartfelt Mormon tribute to this guy's life and aren't really interested in a rescue/survival movie, maybe this would work for you.