Sea of Dust (2008)

This is one of those movies that is really hard to describe in a synopsis.  Basically there is a medical student named Stefan who is headed out to ask for his fiancé’s hand.  Unfortunately for him the father doesn’t like him and refuses the offer.  From that point on Stefan’s day gets much worse.  After he leaves he stumbles upon a woman lying along the side of the road.  The local doctor informs him that many in the area have been sick.  When she wakes up and stabs Stefan thing get even worse.  It seems that a mythic character named Prester John is recruiting people in our world to start another holy war in the name of Christ.  Of course Stefan is key to his plan and is being recruited as a general.  Our hero Stefan isn’t thrilled by this and eventually figures out a rather novel way to stop Prester John’s plan.

This is one of those movies that is totally frustrating to watch.  Sea of Dust starts off with a lot of promise when you have a woman’s head basically exploding on screen.  Sure it is a CGI effect, but they execute it nicely.  But then we are introduced to Stefan and his troubles.  From that point on the movie jumps all over the place and doesn’t ever seem to know what it is supposed to be.  The character of Stefan shifts between worlds, so then it becomes tough to know what is real and what isn’t.  Other characters suddenly show up for brief periods, only to be killed, then brought back again.  Some characters, like the Ingrid Pitt character, are good, then bad, and then good again.  The movie tries to write this all off as them being empty (literally) inside and puppets of Prester John.  But if that is the case then how do they become good again?  There is also a potential plot twist in the end that feels like an excuse for the rest of the movie not to make sense.  In my humble opinion that isn’t clever, that is lazy.

I also have to mention one other thing.  If you can’t tell Sea of Dust is a mess when it comes to plot and narrative.  That is bad enough, but then it wastes much of the time taking shots at Christianity.  Or at least I think that it wants to.  Not only is the villain Prester John a creation of the Catholic Church to justify the crusades, but also he keeps running around talking about torture being God’s way.  Hell one of the characters even says, “Knowledge is always dangerous to religion.”  I’m not offended by this, but it would have been nice if they had actually worked on the script rather then trying to grind that axe.  In other words make sure your own house (in this case your muddled script) is in order before tossing stones.

The one thing that Sea of Dust does pretty well are the effects.  The CGI is handled nicely and looks good.  From the first exploding head to the last knife thru the skull they do pull it off nicely.  There are also a few practical effects that I found fun.  You get a bit where they are investigating the “hollow” woman and a fishing hook thru the neck.  Also there is a nasty looking harpy creature that does something unexpected, but fun.  I only wish that I had a better story to go along with this mess of a story.

I get the distinct feeling that the filmmakers had a lot of good ideas.  But they rushed to put them all on the screen at the same time.  Sea of Dust had some potential, but didn’t get the job done.

1 ½ out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer

© Copyright 2010 John Shatzer