Rock stars
The success of 300 has turned the beginning of March into a period for half-naked men to run free and pummel each other in the name of the almighty box office. This apparently new tradition of annual Fratboy Brawl Cinema gets its first entry with 10,000 BC. Unlike the aforementioned Spartan bash-fest though, this film lacks a certain level of self-awareness, as well as well-spaced doses of kicky, violent fun that makes the experience as boring as walking the entire span of Mesopotamia blind-folded and bare-foot without an iPod.
Young apprentice hunter D’Leh and his dread-locked tribe live a peaceful, woolly mammoth-stalking life in their village. Lately, the hairy elephants have been migrating past their estates less and less though, and their people are beginning to worry about starvation. According to the prophecy intoned by a bug-eyed elderly woman named Old Mother, a warrior will rise, get busy with a child with blue eyes adopted from another tribe, and defeat the ‘four-legged demons’ that come to disrupt their way of life and steal their people to put them into slavery.
Eventually these demons come: marauders on horseback, who rope the peaceniks up and march them over snow, jungle, and desert (pre-continental shift!) to enslave them into their god-like leader’s sphinx and pyramid-building scheme. Of course, D’Leh’s beloved girl with the blue eyes is one of the prisoners and our caveman hero embarks on a journey after his woman, picking up different tribes and amassing an army intent on letting his people go.
10,000 BC is bone-headedly dumb, but what should one expect really? It’s a fracking caveman movie for the Clan Bear’s sake and it should be more fun than you can shake a mammoth tusk at. Unfortunately, the film is a seventh wonder of boredom. Although it’s less than two hours, it feels far longer. The characters track their quarry for miles and the action sequences to break up the walking and army recruitment scenes are few and far between.
What does work though are the computer-generated recreations of woolly mammoths grazing in the plains and later, in the movie’s sole instance of real excitement, stampeding down the pyramid walk-ways. What looks just plain crappy and fake is the fearsome saber-tooth tiger. The juxtaposition between the CGI image of the big cat and the actors performing with him is so sloppily done that it borders on Cool World territory. The most intriguing of the creatures are herds of killer ostriches that stalk D’Leh and company in the jungle areas like velociraptors with feathers and beaks.
Buddha bless director Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow) and his seemingly stubborn mission to unleash CGI-enhanced B-movies onto modern civilization. Had this man been working in the ’50s, we would enjoy his work on MST3K. At this point in his career though, he just needs to stop taking his material so seriously and just step on the gas pedal of his Sci-Fi-Trashmobile. The film could’ve used more species of ferocious animals and less emo hang-ups from the humans. Instead of great battles and prehistoric rumbles, we get the main characters moaning and groaning about daddy abandonment issues and the lack of self-confidence to be a leader. You practically want to throw a copy of A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose at the screen so that we can get on with some killer ostrich action.
During a scene where D’Leh frees a saber-tooth tiger from a trap, he tells the beast, ‘Do not eat me when I set you free.’ You can see the actor struggling to force down the urge to insert Indiana Jones-like pragmatism into the dialogue–a personality trait humans won’t develop for a few more generations. The audience in the theater roared with laughter. 10,000 BC would have been much more fun had Emmerich caught on the joke as well.
