And I have to say that I enjoyed it just as much as I did the first time. The mystery of what is happening to the three college kids and one high schooler who entered the cave is entrancing. Even though I already know. Which isn’t fair to you the reader of this review, because you don’t even know about the cave yet!

Let’s start at the beginning.

Our whole universe was in a hot, dense state
Then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started, wait
The earth began to cool, the autotrophs began to drool
Neanderthals developed tools
We built a wall (we built the pyramids)
Math, science, history, unraveling the mysteries
That all started with the big bang (bang)

Ok. That may have been too far back, and also the theme song to a show rather than about this movie, but I couldn’t resist.

We start with a college professor (Hopper) going out to the desert to search for a missing couple (his parents, but we don’t know that yet.) A student of his (Taylor) knows he went, so when he doesn’t come back, he goes in search of Hopper. Taylor has a crew with him, mostly because he was forced into it. Cara, Jackie, Veeves, and Furby.

They believe Hopper went into a cave, so they plan to repel into it to try and find him. Furby stays behind because he has no repelling skills. He is their lifeline. Left behind with a walkie talkie and some supplies. Furby though becomes weirded out and desperate when nobody will answer the radio. After a few hours he starts to worry. By the next day he is genuinely scared. He ate all the food, drank all the water, and the battery in the jeep is dead because he listened to music all night. So he goes looking for them, even though he has no skills.

But what of Taylor and his trio of women he led into the depths. Well, they are confused about a lot of things. Within minutes of getting to the bottom, their ropes appear to have been cut, so they can’t get back out. Just like Willy Wonka said “You can’t get out backwards, you have to go forwards to go back.” So they forge on to try and find another way out.

There is no way to go into the movie without spoilers. So after this be prepared, because they are coming now. Cara finds Furby’s dead body. (I did warn you they were coming, if you weren’t fully prepared at this point, I feel that is on you.) But he has his video camera with him. They check it out to see what may have happened. They are super confused because his footage shows night falling and the next day coming. Which leads to him falling to his death. But they have only been in the cave for about an hour. And really, Furby has been in there and dead for the majority of that hour!

So…. Huh?!

Turns out the cave is actually the location of the mythical Fountain of Youth. But it isn’t exactly what you think it is. The cave is displaced in time in such a way that anyone inside it becomes unmoored from their time. After some further discoveries, they come to realize that the flickering lights they see outside the vertical cave shaft are actually days passing. As fast as flipping a light switch from on to off to on. Boom. A day has passed.

Whoa. That is going to really have some ramifications for when they get out. Except they then realize the flicker isn’t a day, it’s a season.

There are some parts of that which make the brain get a little gooey. If you start thinking too hard and trying to figure it out, that is. But it is a fascinating idea and a wild ride. And the hour that they spent inside actually means so much more. If each second is a season, that means a minute is 15 years. And an hour would have been 900 years passing outside the cave!

They aren’t alone in the cave though. There are primitive folks living in there that are kinda violent and attacky.

And while I have already spoilered a few things here, I shall leave a few for you to discover on your own.

I highly suggest checking this out. It isn’t overly bloody or scary, and for a sci-fi film it isn’t super techy. This actually reminds me a bit of the old Explorers movie from the 80s with Ethan Hawke. It is a movie with a group that winds up getting in over their heads. The cave is beyond the scope of what humanity understands. Once you start altering the flow of time, things get dicey for most humans.

And while I would like to talk about the ending, again, it would bring about too many spoilers. Besides we already had a long in depth conversation about it. Don’t you remember? Or maybe it hasn’t happened for you yet. Hmmm. Guess I’ll have to wait until later when you remember it, and then we can talk about having previously talked about it.

For me, this is a solid 8. I’m leaning towards a 9. Matter of fact, I am going to retroactively change it to what will be a 9 in the future when you read this, just don’t forget at one point it was an 8 before you got here.