The Last Descent
starring Chadwick Hopson, Alexis Johnson, Landon Henneman, Jyllian Petrie and Jacob Omer
screenplay by Isaac Halasima
directed by Isaac Halasima
Rating: ◊◊◊◊◊
A 2016 biographical survival drama based on the true story of John Edward Jones (1983 – 2009) who died in the Nutty Putty Cave in Utah, USA during a Thanksgiving holiday spelunking expedition with his brother. I’d never heard of the Nutty Putty Cave. It sounds like a made-up thing to me, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. It’s a real thing, after all - a notoriously narrow and twisting cave system. The deeper spelunkers go into it, the more humid it gets, and the rock walls begin to soften like clay. Jones took a wrong turn and got stuck head-down in a passage too narrow to escape. After several hours of failed rescue attempts, he died of a heart attack. His body could not be recovered, so the cave was closed with an explosion, and a commemorative plaque marks the site today.
I learned about the story and the film after watching a random Youtube video of someone visiting the site.
It reminded me of the 2007 movie Into the Wild (directed by Sean Penn), which portrayed the disastrous 1992 misadventure of idealist Chris McCandless (1968 - 1992) who sought virtue by living unvarnished in the Alaska wilderness. I hated it. I am attracted to intelligence, and stupidity - especially deliberate, wilful, wanton stupidity - disgusts and repels me. I don’t like naivete and hubris, either. What is it with young men who think Nature is cool and wonderful, and that adventure-seeking in Nature is a good idea. Important note: everything in Nature wants to kill you. And, it can. It doesn’t matter what you believe about Mankind’s proper place and behaviour in the natural scheme of things; it doesn’t matter how fit you are and how much adventurous experience you have. Nature is waiting to annihilate you.
The kind of selfish hubris demonstrated by Chris McCandless in 1992 and by John Edwards in 2009 earns them Darwin Awards. They might have been sweet fellows personally. But removing themselves from our gene pool might also have been their greatest achievements.
Or not.