I just got around to watching Sahara on cable. I was pretty desperate for some good adventure movies and this was about the only thing on in the genre I hadn’t seen before. I hadn’t watched it before because my Significant Otherer had already watched it and she said it was bad, and she’s usually right about these things.
Boy, was she right. Watching it was a horrible experience … seeing all that money going to waste on the screen there. The thing was, they must have had a nice chunk of change to make Sahara, but god, it didn’t do them a bit of good.
All I really saw was Matthew McConnaughey bouncing around the desert to inappropriate music, partying and having a good time driving cigarette boats aruond and pretending to outfight guys who could clearly have crushed him. The plot didn’t make any sense:
So the submarine is an easy camel’s ride from the secret base, sitting out in the open for all to see, but no one knows where it is???
I gotta tell you, there were an awful lot of syndicated adventure shows back in the 90s, any ONE of whose episodes was better written, better directed and better acted than “Sahara.” Name one, you say? How about “The Lost World”? It had dinosaurs and bikini-clad cavegirls and weird tribes and dirgibles popping up everywhere, and it STILL made more sense than Sahara.
Still the scenery was great. It kept reminding me of how much money they were spending to do location shooting for this piece of crap. That’s what made it so heartbreaking. Andy Sidaris could have done a big-busted babes with machine guns movie with 1/10 the budget and it would have come out a LOT better. (For one thing, it would have had big-busted babes with machine guns, but the writing, acting and direction would have been a lot better, too.
So many good adventure movies could have been made with all that money. Instead, we got a big pile of Sahara.
I actually didn’t mind this movie so much. It was a typical adventure movie. I’ve seen better I’ve seen worse.
Favorite line…
Trapped in the sub with the entire bad guy army after them. They decide that if they kill the main guy the rest will flee. They manage to kill him and the army turns and flees.
Shrug. I found it very entertaining. McConnaghy and Zahn had good chemistry, I LOVED the music and thought it was a good bubble gum flick. Actually, we have it on DVD and we put it on whenever we want to watch a good family action movie.
The whole time I was thinking “This doesnt make any sense…but the ride is alright.”
I think the sub being half buried on the side of a mountain isn’t the part of the plot that makes no sense. I mean come frickin’ on the desert is MASSIVE.
The part of the plot that didn’t make any sense was what exactly the bad guy was doing. I got something about radioactive material… that’s about it.
I had to show this film to Pepper Mill. It’s so wonderfully awful. It’s a great big preposterous adventure flick that makes very little sense, but is fun if you either 1.) turn off your critical faculties; oor 2.) keep saying “This movie can’t get any more preposterous!” and being proven wrong, over and over.
By the way, after seeing it, I had to read the book. The book doesn’t have the absurdities, by and large, of the movie. It has a whole different set of absurdities. A fun and fast and mindless read.
To me it looked like we were looking at Matthew McConnaughey and Steve Zahn “Vacation in the Sahara” slides with a little bit of plot between pictures to make it into something like a movie. It just didn’t feel like an actual story to me.
It’s not a logical, nit-picky thing, it’s the fact that the whole thing doesn’t hang together well. It’s a bunch of very loose connective tissue stringing together a lot of beautiful images of the Sahara desert and a few set-piece fights. Not much more than the kind of stuff you see providing rationales for the sex scenes in a soft core porn movie. (Actually, a few – not many, but a few – soft core porn films are pretty well put together, and a larger number are put together about as well as Sahara.)
I don’t think that’s just a matter of being nitpicky and logical. It’s a much broader, more basic criticism of the film.
I thought it was fun!
Probably Cussler’s high point; nothing he’s done since has quite matched it (and some haven’t been any good at all… )
The ship was an early ironclad, not a sub, so it was able to sail up the Niger during a period of several wet years and got beached when the river tributary it was in dried out too much for it to escape. Why it sailed up the Niger in the first place, I have no idea.
It was gradually covered up by drifting sands, but the local tribes had known about it - hence the old drawings on the wall they found in the village.
The giant waste treatment centre was supposed to use solar power to incinerate hazardous waste well away from any population centres for safety but the owner cut corners to make more money and stored all the crap underground, which started leaking out into a dried-up riverbed (underground aquifier still there) and then down into the Niger and to the coast, which caused the disease the WHO were investigating…
See! It all makes sense!!
And you should be grateful they cut the subplot about Lincoln’s double which was in the book!
I can’t help it. I love this movie. I’ve read every Dirk Pitt book there is, and while I rebelled against the casting originally, if you look at it from a “They’re not really Pitt and Giordino” perspective, McConaughey and Zahn did a great job. Sure, the movie doesn’t quite hang together, and I can’t say I’m not disappointed that they left out the Amelia Earhart wannabe, the hidden gold mines complete with slave labor, and the mummified corpse of Abraham Lincoln, but I love it, nevertheless.
It probably won’t rate a sequel, but I would like to cast my vote for either Treasure or Night Probe.
Having read every Cussler novel, I can attest that if you are going to try to portray one of them on the big screen, the producers of Sahara did about as good a job as one anyone could possibly do.
It was cerrtainly a lot more fun than the previous Dirk Pitt effort, Raise the Titanic. That was an interesting book at first, but quickly got stupid.
By the way, Cussler is clearly the ultimate male “Mary Sue”. He himself uses his money to search for shipwrecks (and has written two fascinating books about it), with particular emphasis on Civil War-era ironclads, just like his heroes. He’s written himself as “Clive Cussler” into some of his books, too (including “Sahara”)
As long as we are nitpicking, I believe this was filmed in parts of Mali and Nigeria, so that would technically be the Sahel (the area between the Sahara and the Sudan), not the Sahara.
Yeah, after the first couple of pages of a “Dirk Pitt Novel” I start looking for the cameo. Good thing they are usually near the end or I’d never finish some of them.
I’ve always assumed that he based that character loosely on Beryl Markham and her prangs in the Eastern Sahara (scroll down to ‘Daring Solo Flight’) although she survived them… )
