...most of the film is simply a matter of waiting for it to end.
(Let me say this right now: This is not a children's movie. It is rated PG-13. Some sequences and characters can be scary. There are subtitles throughout the production. This isn't an action film in the conventional sense. Regardless of how the trailers portray "10,000 BC," it's no "300" or comic-book movie. It's not really for kids.)
Now then, you would think in a movie ostensibly about warriors and fighting and revolution, there would be blood. Of some kind. Not buckets and buckets of blood, but something to signify people are dying besides their keeling over with a spear in their backs. The lack of blood is a microcosm for everything wrong with the film: It's sanitized for the teen audience to garner a PG-13 rating and dumbed down into horrific stereotypes to make up for a lack of characterization, ripping off any number of other movies. In other words, there isn't much to see here we haven't seen before done bigger, better, and with more panache.
One of the criticisms of "300" was the depiction of the Persians as Middle Eastern stereotypes and Xerxes as nothing more than a flamboyant gay man in makeup. Both fair, I guess; but then where is the outcry against any of Emmerich's characters? Each new group D'Leh encounters is a different shade of brown. In fact, the only light-skinned characters in the movie are the evil slave traders and the man everyone bows down to, only known as the Almighty. And all the tribes are agile warriors, suggesting there are no other kinds of colored people in this universe. (I will point out D'Leh is considered a coward at first and not worthy of being a warrior.) And the Almighty's advisors? All effeminate. I could be seeing offenses where none actually exist, although it would have been nice to see Emmerich acknowledge the problems with "300," the film with which his movie would be most compared.
There turns out to be very little heart or humanity in any of the characters. They are all designed to convey a certain type, to rely on our movie intellect to form the person instead of developing each person through the script. Why does Evolet love D'Leh so much, and vice versa? We never get to know anything about their personalities or see them spend much time together. Are other warriors so upset with D'Leh they can't acknowledge he will try to rescue them all? Is he their only hope of not dying a slave; why not give the guy the benefit of the doubt?
It's sad, really. If "10,000 BC" lived up to half of its potential, it might have been an entertaining movie. Aside from occasionally decent CGI creatures and one or two action sequences, there really isn't anything to recommend. You can't even get historical accuracy from the film. None of what is being portrayed could have happened at the time suggested by the title due to various technological discoveries and improvements not having come about for centuries afterward.
On the action: The climactic battle on the side of a pyramid is perhaps the worst mass action scene in recent film history. Not because of its lunacy (though it does play a part), but because there's never a sense of tension or buildup to it. Everything just…happens, for lack of a better word, hoping to come off as a grandiose event. Either Emmerich doesn't know how to film action with only actors involved, or his budget only allowed for long-shot CGI creations. Whatever the reason, it's blasé and uninspired.
Sequences with woolly mammoths or saber-toothed tigers (especially the one played up in the trailers) fall flat not because they employ sub-par CGI but because everything happens due to "destiny." D'Leh is supposed to fall into a pit and avoid spiked speaks. He's supposed to free a tiger before he drowns and tell him not to attack. The tiger is supposed to show up, proclaiming D'Leh's future almost like Aslan in "The Chronicles of Narnia." I mean, come on. Didn't we get enough destiny mumbo-jumbo that never made sense in the latest "Star Wars" movies?
"10,000 BC" never manages to be awe-inspiring, epic, or involving the way it should be. Humorous asides between two children come off more like C-3PO and R2-D2 moments of levity than anything remotely realistic. And it's never a good thing when I'm laughing at the unintentionally funny climax. Hit the enemy on the head with a mallet, indeed. Put the audience out of their misery and knock them out, too. Although I was never bored by the story, a lack of anything meaningful destroys any positives I could come up with.
Jason's Film Rating: 3/10
Video:
As has been their wont of late, Warner Bros. offer the film in both full and widescreen on opposite sides of the same disc. The full-screen is a pan-and-scan affair, cutting out a good deal of the screen image left and right; the widescreen is a 2.40:1 ratio that preserves the film's theatrical dimensions.
The anamorphic widescreen transfer does what it can with a picture that doesn't always display the clearest possible picture. The director no doubt wanted to portray our ancient ancestors in the darkest, most-primitive possible light, thus using a subdued color pallette throughout the film. At its best, the picture is clean, with strong contrasts and deep black levels. At its worst, it's soft and fuzzy, with a kind of dull veneer veiling the images. Mostly, though, the video is fine for what it has to do, and the whites of the snow show up especially well, as do most daylight shots.
Audio:
The Dolby Digital 5.1 audio easily upstages the picture quality. It displays an excellent left-to-right stereo spread, a thundering bass, and some superb surround sound. The mammoth hunt near the beginning of the story demonstrates the best sonic characteristics the film has to offer. Later, the sounds of the forest, the beasts, and the hubbub of the crowds impressively envelop the listener.
Extras:
Warners put the special features only on side one, the widescreen side. They include just two items in any case. The first is an alternate ending, about three minutes, and the second is a series of ten additional scenes, about ten minutes total. WB present all of these segments in widescreen, and I wonder why they didn't use them in the theatrical cut to flesh it out. The extras conclude with some theatrical trailers at start-up only; twenty-six scene selections but no chapter insert; English, French, and Spanish spoken languages; French and Spanish subtitles; and English captions for the hearing impaired.
Parting Shots:
The first big-scale movies I remember seeing in my youth were a rerelease of "Gone With the Wind" and later the première of Cecil B. DeMille's "The Ten Commandments." They were enormously long, epic films, but they seemed to move along very quickly. By contrast, "10,000 BC" is only 109 minutes, counting about ten minutes of closing credits, yet it goes by in what seems like six hours. Not all "big" is the same. This one has a story that fails to engage us and characters who fail to involve us. The movie is plain, old-fashioned dull.
Now then, you would think in a movie ostensibly about warriors and fighting and revolution, there would be blood. Of some kind. Not buckets and buckets of blood, but something to signify people are dying besides their keeling over with a spear in their backs. The lack of blood is a microcosm for everything wrong with the film: It's sanitized for the teen audience to garner a PG-13 rating and dumbed down into horrific stereotypes to make up for a lack of characterization, ripping off any number of other movies. In other words, there isn't much to see here we haven't seen before done bigger, better, and with more panache.
One of the criticisms of "300" was the depiction of the Persians as Middle Eastern stereotypes and Xerxes as nothing more than a flamboyant gay man in makeup. Both fair, I guess; but then where is the outcry against any of Emmerich's characters? Each new group D'Leh encounters is a different shade of brown. In fact, the only light-skinned characters in the movie are the evil slave traders and the man everyone bows down to, only known as the Almighty. And all the tribes are agile warriors, suggesting there are no other kinds of colored people in this universe. (I will point out D'Leh is considered a coward at first and not worthy of being a warrior.) And the Almighty's advisors? All effeminate. I could be seeing offenses where none actually exist, although it would have been nice to see Emmerich acknowledge the problems with "300," the film with which his movie would be most compared.
There turns out to be very little heart or humanity in any of the characters. They are all designed to convey a certain type, to rely on our movie intellect to form the person instead of developing each person through the script. Why does Evolet love D'Leh so much, and vice versa? We never get to know anything about their personalities or see them spend much time together. Are other warriors so upset with D'Leh they can't acknowledge he will try to rescue them all? Is he their only hope of not dying a slave; why not give the guy the benefit of the doubt?
It's sad, really. If "10,000 BC" lived up to half of its potential, it might have been an entertaining movie. Aside from occasionally decent CGI creatures and one or two action sequences, there really isn't anything to recommend. You can't even get historical accuracy from the film. None of what is being portrayed could have happened at the time suggested by the title due to various technological discoveries and improvements not having come about for centuries afterward.
On the action: The climactic battle on the side of a pyramid is perhaps the worst mass action scene in recent film history. Not because of its lunacy (though it does play a part), but because there's never a sense of tension or buildup to it. Everything just…happens, for lack of a better word, hoping to come off as a grandiose event. Either Emmerich doesn't know how to film action with only actors involved, or his budget only allowed for long-shot CGI creations. Whatever the reason, it's blasé and uninspired.
Sequences with woolly mammoths or saber-toothed tigers (especially the one played up in the trailers) fall flat not because they employ sub-par CGI but because everything happens due to "destiny." D'Leh is supposed to fall into a pit and avoid spiked speaks. He's supposed to free a tiger before he drowns and tell him not to attack. The tiger is supposed to show up, proclaiming D'Leh's future almost like Aslan in "The Chronicles of Narnia." I mean, come on. Didn't we get enough destiny mumbo-jumbo that never made sense in the latest "Star Wars" movies?
"10,000 BC" never manages to be awe-inspiring, epic, or involving the way it should be. Humorous asides between two children come off more like C-3PO and R2-D2 moments of levity than anything remotely realistic. And it's never a good thing when I'm laughing at the unintentionally funny climax. Hit the enemy on the head with a mallet, indeed. Put the audience out of their misery and knock them out, too. Although I was never bored by the story, a lack of anything meaningful destroys any positives I could come up with.
Jason's Film Rating: 3/10
Video:
As has been their wont of late, Warner Bros. offer the film in both full and widescreen on opposite sides of the same disc. The full-screen is a pan-and-scan affair, cutting out a good deal of the screen image left and right; the widescreen is a 2.40:1 ratio that preserves the film's theatrical dimensions.
The anamorphic widescreen transfer does what it can with a picture that doesn't always display the clearest possible picture. The director no doubt wanted to portray our ancient ancestors in the darkest, most-primitive possible light, thus using a subdued color pallette throughout the film. At its best, the picture is clean, with strong contrasts and deep black levels. At its worst, it's soft and fuzzy, with a kind of dull veneer veiling the images. Mostly, though, the video is fine for what it has to do, and the whites of the snow show up especially well, as do most daylight shots.
Audio:
The Dolby Digital 5.1 audio easily upstages the picture quality. It displays an excellent left-to-right stereo spread, a thundering bass, and some superb surround sound. The mammoth hunt near the beginning of the story demonstrates the best sonic characteristics the film has to offer. Later, the sounds of the forest, the beasts, and the hubbub of the crowds impressively envelop the listener.
Extras:
Warners put the special features only on side one, the widescreen side. They include just two items in any case. The first is an alternate ending, about three minutes, and the second is a series of ten additional scenes, about ten minutes total. WB present all of these segments in widescreen, and I wonder why they didn't use them in the theatrical cut to flesh it out. The extras conclude with some theatrical trailers at start-up only; twenty-six scene selections but no chapter insert; English, French, and Spanish spoken languages; French and Spanish subtitles; and English captions for the hearing impaired.
Parting Shots:
The first big-scale movies I remember seeing in my youth were a rerelease of "Gone With the Wind" and later the première of Cecil B. DeMille's "The Ten Commandments." They were enormously long, epic films, but they seemed to move along very quickly. By contrast, "10,000 BC" is only 109 minutes, counting about ten minutes of closing credits, yet it goes by in what seems like six hours. Not all "big" is the same. This one has a story that fails to engage us and characters who fail to involve us. The movie is plain, old-fashioned dull.
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[release]23594[/release]