by Ryan Lewellen
During the 2013 Egyptian protests, a father-daughter team of archeologists discovers a buried pyramid unlike any other manmade structure. A documentary crew is cataloguing their progress, when the social unrest begins threatening their dig. Fully intending to leave, they decide to use what little time they have sending a rover, on loan from NASA, into their discovery to satisfy their collective curiosity. When the brave (and expensive) robot goes missing, however, they are forced to search for it, get lost immediately, and make one stupid decision after another until they are all dead. Trust me. That’s not spoiling a damn thing.
I was lured into watching this boo-boo by the promise it was “accidental comedy” material. It was certainly an accident, but there isn’t much to laugh at in this joyless affair. The characters are non-existent, the performances are weak, the script is thin to the point of vanishing, the effects are something out of 90s television, and worst of all, it ruins a perfectly cool idea.
Here is the deal. I am ASKING you not to watch this movie, because it is a waste of your time. I don’t care if you spend all of your time sticking q-tips too far into your ear, and never learning from the experience. That sounds like a fulfilling afternoon activity compared to watching The Pyramid. So, the big third-act discovery is something I feel no guilt in revealing and discussing in this review. You have been warned.
It turns out this pyramid was buried for a damn good reason. The gods of ancient Egypt were very real. The most dreaded and still earthbound among them was Anubis, who started tearing out the still-beating hearts of his followers in search of a soul pure enough to reunite him with his father, Osiris, in the afterlife. After a few centuries of their organs being weighed against Ma’at, it seems the people of Egypt decided to dispatch this nasty tyrant (an intriguing comparison to the modern day uprising which is the film’s setting). The team is being chased by a bunch of bony cat demons, and then by something larger, and then, there he is: Jackyl-headed Anubis, completely robbed of his glory by terrible CGI and a complete lack of understanding in the composition department.
How cool could that have been? That is a really creepy and fun idea! In more capable hands, this phoned-in act of boredom could have been a beauty of a low-budget horror film! They manage to get a few nasty deaths in there, including some face melting, but there is very little entertainment to speak of, and absolutely no intellectual engagement to note. It can’t even choose a format.
This movie begins in found footage. It gives you a brief preface about a disappearance, and opens on a number of first person perspective handheld shots during the exposition. Then, as though the pyramid has a maximum occupancy rule, a new camera seems to be added every time a cast member bites the dust. They don’t entirely give up on the primary format, however, and if anything could make found footage less effective, it would most certainly be half-assed found footage. The movie insists on cutting back to the perspective of the documentary cameraman, who is truly shooting all of this for no reason, since their cameras are not the only way we can witness these events. The ineptitude boggles the mind. That lack of continuity, if nothing else, will finally give you something to think about while watching, other than who could possibly have thought up the line, “When will you stop being an archeologist and start being a human being?”
Avoid.
The Pyramid is now available on Blu-ray and DVD from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment
