...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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Note: In the following joint Blu-ray review, both John and Jason take a look at the movie, with John also writing up the Video, Audio, Extras, and Parting Shots.
The Movie According to John:
Roland Emmerich seems unable to think small. The word is clearly not in his vocabulary. He gives us things like "Independence Day," "Godzilla," "The Patriot," and "The Day After Tomorrow": big movies filled with big casts and big special effects. With "ID4" the spectacle worked because he did the film tongue in cheek. With the others, the scale tended to overwhelm the subject matter. So, has he learned his lesson? Not with "10,000 BC." The only thing he scaled down in this 2008 production was leaving the punctuation out of B.C. Otherwise, it's more of the same: lots of CGI and a minimum of story and character. This gets tiresome really fast, even in a movie with a clear, high-definition image and robust Dolby TrueHD sound.
On the plus side, at least we don't have Raquel Welch or Ringo Starr battling dinosaurs. On the minus side, we don't get much that resembles serious historical accuracy. I mean, the story starts out OK, with prehistoric Man hunting mammoths in the northern lands of Europe (or Asia; it's unclear), but it soon disintegrates into melodramatic hogwash about pyramids and domesticated mammoths and hints of higher intelligences, gods, or Atlanteans helping to advance civilization.
Maybe Emmerich thought he was doing another "2001," I dunno. He gets away with playing fast and loose with archaeological events by having his film's narrator (Omar Sharif) explain that the story is about myth and legend. Maybe he should also have said it was about fantasy and science fiction because that's pretty much what it comes down to.
The main character in the story is D'Leh (Steven Strait). At least, I think he's the main character since he shows up more often than anybody else. It's hard to tell, though, as the characters look so much alike under their heavy clothing, dark hairpieces, and thick makeup. An old woman, considered a shaman of sorts by D'Leh's people, foretells that four-legged demons will come among them and that D'Leh will become their savior. They do, and he does.
The first things we learn about people twelve thousand years ago is that they apparently never washed, and they had oddities with their language. Dubious. Even animals in the wild keep clean, but D'Leh's people seem dirty all the time, with matted, knotted hair and faces that look as though they use mud for mascara. Worse, his people speak modern English haltingly and with an accent. Sure, having characters speak in a movie audience's native tongue is a convention we have come to accept, unless we want subtitles, but why do these characters speak as though they had just recently learned to speak a second language?
Anyway, the object of D'Leh's eye is the lovely Evolet (Camilla Belle), whom the prophecy says D'Leh will marry. The trouble is, it ain't going to be easy. When the four-legged demons arrive (on horseback; therefore, four legs), they are slave traders who raid and pillage D'Leh's village, taking prisoners with them to sell into captivity. Evolet is one of the prisoners they take. Incidentally, while the others of D'Leh's people look like that five-thousand-year-old mummified "Iceman" that scientists found frozen in the snow some years ago, Ms. Belle looks like she just stepped through the front portals of Hollywood High. Only in the movies, I suppose.
D'Leh survives the raid and heads out to rescue his love and the others taken captive, thus potentially fulfilling his mythic destiny. What he gets into is utterly preposterous. He and several companions travel from their frozen homeland in the North, over snowcapped mountains, through humid tropical rain forests, into arid, rocky wastelands, and finally to a flat, desert terrain, all within what appears to be a few days. Along the trek, D'Leh frees and befriends a huge, saber-toothed cat, battles gigantic, flightless birds, and gathers an army to fight the great nations of the South. He makes it look easy.
This is where the story really falls apart. D'Leh presumably winds up in Egypt, where he finds a highly advanced civilization using slave labor and trained mammoths to build pyramids as instructed by a ruler known only as the "Almighty." (Am I giving away too much? I think not, since the movie's trailers showed these very scenes.) Now, I know there are some people who subscribe to such radical theories about early pyramid building, but recent archaeological evidence suggests that the Egyptians started constructing their first pyramids about five thousand years ago, not twelve thousand, and that they did not use massive armies of slaves to build them but small groups of highly skilled workers whom they probably paid well for their efforts.
And domesticated mammoths? If we were to believe that, common sense would lead us to ask, Then why did mammoths become extinct? And why didn't the Egyptians ever mention mammoths in their hieroglyphics or portray them in their paintings (if, indeed, the people D'Leh encounters are ancestors of Egyptians at all--the movie never refers to them by name, although it does show us what appears to be the Sphinx under construction)?
Emmerich presents the entire story in a slow, solemn procession of scenes that would suggest he thought of it as some kind of religious ceremony. None of his characters ever laughs or jokes. Or bare smile, as far I could tell. It's as if he thought human nature was somehow different back then; that life was so hard and the people so uncivilized, no one had any fun. People are people, and I'm sure our ancestors had as much of a good time as we do today. Still, that might spoil the tenor of Emmerich's picture, so everybody's got to be deadly serious. D'Leh and his companions even walk to slow, solemn, heroic-sounding music. It gets awfully silly, awfully fast.
"10,000 BC" has all the excitement of a National Geographic Channel special but with none of the content. Although the CGI work is OK, the cinematography is pleasing, the high-def picture and sound are nice, and a couple of segments--notably a mammoth hunt early on--are reasonably exciting, most of the film is simply a matter of waiting for it to end.
John's Film Rating: 4/10
The Movie According to Jason:
I can't quite decide if "10,000 BC" is a rich man's "Pathfinder" or a poor man's "300." Or maybe an ancient version of "The Lost World: Jurassic Park." How about an even older "Dances with Wolves," only except wolves we get woolly mammoths and saber tooth tigers roaming the countryside. Whichever previous film Emmerich's latest took its cues from, it still ends up being as tediously boring as the name suggests.
When their small tribe is attacked and people taken captive by slave traders, four remaining warriors set out to retrieve their brothers and sisters. D'Leh (Steven Strait) is trying to accomplish two different things: remove the stain of his father's so-called cowardice and rescue the woman he loves (Camilla Belle). Through their journey from the snowy mountains to the sun-scorched desert, D'Leh and his little band of warriors encounter people, creatures, and obstacles they never would have encountered otherwise and, thus, become legends in their own right.
Maybe Emmerich doesn't quite understand the little box we'd all love to put him in, the one he excels at based on his previous directorial efforts. "Independence Day," "Godzilla," "The Day After Tomorrow" are all big, loud, crowd-pleasing action films set in familiar locations. The White House is blown up, New York is covered in snow, or Madison Square Garden is the breeding ground for deadly babies. This is the kind of film we expect, not a mind-bendingly lackluster effort that raises more questions than it answers and always seems to be reaching for a certain MPAA rating instead of crafting a complete movie experience.
(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.)
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