I would imagine that most people have at least heard of this 2005 film and maybe about the fact that it is one of the largest box-office failures of all time. I watched it for the first time ever a few days ago and while I do think it is pretty bad, I don't think it was awful enough to deserve the reputation that it has.

The movie begins in a confusing way with a US civil war naval battle taking place on the USS Texas which was transporting a shipment of Confederate gold coins from Richmond Virginia to, i don't know where. I thought i started the wrong film.

Then we immediately jump to modern day Mali, where a disease has broken out and World Health Organization Dr. Eva Rojas (Penelope Cruz) is investigating the source of the disease and trying to help out. While doing some sort of investigation (alone, away from civilization, in a country currently in a civil war) she is attacked and her research is taken from her. She avoids being killed because Dirk Pitt (Matthew McConaughey) just happens to be nearby when it happens.

the scene in the picture doesn't occur until much later, but I knew it would happen during the opening credits

She ends up on a treasure hunting ship to recover from her wounds and through some dialogue that really isn't important ends up going on a mission further inland to look for the gold that was on that ironclad boat that was in the opening minutes of the movie. This is where my real problems with the movie begins

Why Mali? Why did they choose a landlocked country for a speedboat adventure? The ship they just left, the research vessel where Dr Rojas is recovering on is clearly in the ocean, but now they are scooting up the river into Mali, which even if there is a river wide and deep enough for a speedboat to get in there - which may be true, like most people, I have a low level of knowledge of the topography of Mali - it is certainly beyond the range of fuel capacity of such a small gas-guzzling vessel that they are using for the journey. Maybe the boat was airlifted in, i dunno, I'm not a boat guy but the logistics just don't make sense to me.

A bunch of battles break out between them and military forces that are very Rambo-esque in the way that very few people get shot, especially not our heroes who have very little difficulty running directly into machine gun fire unscathed.

This only invites question about how the USS Texas ended up there in the first place. As the name "Ironclad" would suggest, the ship was made of iron and had a very low clearance and would almost certainly sink after it ran out of fuel 100 miles or so into the 4 and a half thousand mile journey from Virginia

data=SQkdYDfnWY0NUTUoJc-.png FAR!

There are plenty of other physical impossibilities that take place in this movie but I'll let you discover them for yourself if you bother to watch this. Action movies aren't meant to be realistic, so these elements alone wouldn't deter people from going to see the film. There are a lot of theories out there as to why the movie lost $90 million or so but one of the main ones is that Matthew McConaughey wasn't a box-office draw in 2005 like he is today. He was at that time mostly a rom-com star and hadn't seen a budget anywhere near this one up to that point.

If I were you, i would watch this movie anyway, not because it is an epic action movie, but because of how absurd it is. It is also a rather big piece of history as one of the biggest bombs to ever happen in cinema.

5 / 10

Name: Sahara (film): huge budget film that bombed
Item: Sahara
Author: @gooddream

Comments · 6

@as-abir(45)· 2824d

Sahara tries to be an action-adventure comedy about a treasure hunt, but when it boils down to picking a single appropriate genre, Breck Eisner fails to find the appropriate balance to make it work.

Sahara ends up becoming a well shot film which has some good action, but it gets thrown off by its failed attempts to be humourous and outlandish plot. I'm still not fully sure what the plot was trying to say, but either way it's message didn't come across clear enough amid all the complicated plotting, and so the actual adventure didn't have the proper feel of an adventure experience. Sahara essentially tries to be a combination of story elements from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Mummy and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension!, but fails to balance them all and ends up as a generic and scattershot project which borrows elements from them all without dealing fair justice to them. It's story just isn't good, and like the previous Clive Cussler film adaptation, the famously atrocious Raise the Titanic! it just fails to succeed in being a good adaptation or a good film. Some viewers may appreciate the colour and the childish sense of fun in the adventure and sense of humour, but others are likely to see Sahara as an excessively muddled adventure full of flat jokes. And its characters are stuck in the role of being part of the outlandish plot and don't seem like action heroes. Although this makes Sahara seem slightly more believable, it doesn't elevate it beyond the excessive silliness that Sahara has to deal with due to Breck Eisner's direction. I'd certainly commend Matthew McConaughey and Penelope Cruz for their efforts, as well as Steve Zahn even though he had the weakest character of the script. But with nothing to work with, their slick charms only go so far and not far enough to wade through the lengthy and not-so-entertaining runtime of Sahara. Really, Sahara is just an overly glamourous film which lacked sufficient depth or serious entertainment value.

But from a stylish perspective, Sahara is well constructed. It's musical score is consistently strong in maintaining the adventure feel of the story, and so it is in fact atmospheric. Sahara knows what it is and doesn't try to be anything else, but really with its budget it wouldn't hurt to at least try. The visual appeal of Sahara is great because the entire film is colourful with its beautiful locations and good production design, as well as it's attractive cast members. The cinematography was great because it balanced good distances and angles during key scenes as well as having some strong tracking shots during moments of movement which capture the beaustiful view of the landscape, as in the sights of the beautiful Sahara desert and the ocean. That enhances the visual appeal and does manage to elevate the quality of Sahara above what it has been set up for in terms of entertainment value. So it's safe to say Sahara may succeed in offering really cheap thrills on a really high budget, but aside from that it just doesn't reach out to me. It may have years ago and it does have some decent moments, but Sahara is long and rudimentary as a whole

@moarafatshow(53)· 2825d

You know a film is gonna bomb, when the review under it says it’s a mixture of Sherlock Holmes, Indian jones and James Bond.

Shit like that just doesn’t work majority of that time because you don’t know what the movie is about.

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@moghul(65)· 2825d

Movie has many flaws but i felt there is entertainment quotient. I liked penelope cruz in the movie. My rating would be 6/10

@kwadjobonsu(61)· 2825d

This movie had a lot of potentials, however, in the end, it was just not enough to make me want to see it again. Most aspects of this movie seem out of place. The soundtrack music, meant to invoke a certain nostalgia I think, was, in my opinion, way out of place for most scenes. The comedy at times seemed forced. The henchmen have to be the dumbest in screen history. You can forgive a little bit of this given that the movie is trying to take a page from the Indiana Jones trilogy, but they just make the henchmen way too stupid and unobservant.

All in all, I can see why this film did not do the business at the theater that was expected of it. A shame, a good cast, just not a lot there for them to work with

@empress-eremmy(76)· 2825d

Never bothered watching at the time. Still don't think I will as there as so many movies to get back to when I have the time so I guess your review will be satisfactory for me

@jozef230(72)· 2825d

My opinion is 5/10 too. Have a nice day.

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