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Did you enjoy Brendan Fraser in The Mummy?  What about Harrison Ford in any of the Indiana Jones movies?  Nicolas Cage in National Treasure? Other adventure, history, archeology, blockbuster films?

Well, you won’t be getting that in Sands of Oblivion, but the movie does mix Egyptology, freemasonry, and archaeology, just not very well.  The story line has great possibilities.  Based on the true story of famed director Cecil B. DeMille, who after filming the 1923 version of the Ten Commandments in the California desert, had the movie set–the replicas Egyptian architecture–buried under sand.  It seems that in an effort to make the set more realistic, DeMille had imported some authentic artifacts, thereby unleashing evil that could only be contained by an amulet.  Or so the movie claims.

Fast forward to the present, in which the last person alive who knows the location of the set is an John Tevis (Oscar winner George Kennedy) who as a boy lived on the set with his father, a producer for the Ten Commandments.  He, along with his grandson (Victor Webster), an Iraq war vet, impose on the excavation site of an archeologist (Morena Baccarin) attempting to find DeMille’s lost set before it goes under water for good.  While looking for the time capsule he buried 80-years prior, Tevis unwittingly unleashes the dark power that DeMille and company had tried to imprison.  Add to this the arrival of the archeologist’s’s soon to be ex-husband (Adam Baldwin; remember Firefly?), and you have the makings of a blockbuster movie in the vein of those mentioned above.  At least you should.  But it doesn’t turn out that way.

The acting is a bit overdone, the dialogue a bit too hokey, and the special effects a little too special.  As in, they looked fake.  As in, there was no ignoring the makeup and animations.  Granted, this was a made-for-cable film, but the story has so much potential that just goes to waste. 

That said if you like the movies on the SciFi Channel (no I’m not talking about Tin Man), then you may enjoy Sands of Oblivion.  Just don’t expect Congo (maybe the Scorpion King though).