Roland Emmerich, the man who brought us Independence Day, Godzilla and The Day After Tomorrow, is the one running the cinematic time machine to take us back to the Upper Paleolithic (or thereabouts) period. But what does he find there? Is it prehistoric man discovering agriculture or magnificent beasts that we've never laid eyes on? No. Emmerich travels back to 10,000 B.C. only to find the same time worn cliches that plague modern man. The press materials spin the tale as "a sweeping odyssey into a mythical age of prophesies and gods, when spirits rule the land and mighty mammoths shake the earth." Wow. I guess that sounds more impressive than lovesick prehistoric man traverses the globe to rescue the woman he loves. In fact, if you swap out the woman for a son, you pretty much have The Day After Tomorrow in which Dennis Quaid showed his fatherly devotion by walking up the east coast of the newly frozen U.S. in order to find his son. May be all the snow in that global warming disaster film inspired Emmerich to make an Ice Age movie.
But Emmerich's film has about as much to do with history as Apocalypto or The Other Boleyn Girl. But at least neither of those films jolted viewers by stepping so egregiously out of their historical time zones. In fact. I think the animated comedy Ice Age might be more accurate than Emmerich's film. Now I'm not saying that filmmakers can't play a little fast and loose with the facts in order to fashion a engaging narrative but Emmerich and co-writer Harald Kloser push credibility so far that it just snaps. Either that or I must have dozed off during my prehistoric history class because I just don't recall anything about woolly mammoths helping to build the pyramids or prehistoric man having a great dental plan (check out the pearly whites in the climatic final scenes). And I just never knew that you could walk right out of the Ice Age and into Ancient Egypt in a matter of days. But Emmerich's characters have no trouble pulling that miracle off. Heck, Emmerich should have just gone one step further and included Charelton Heston as Moses parting the Red Sea for Emmerich's prehistoric man.
Prehistoric cover girl -- look at those pearly whites. (Warner Bros.)
The latest variation of Emmerich's paint-by-numbers formula for a hero's journey involves a prehistoric hunter, D'leh (Steven Strait). D'leh has grown up thinking his father, the tribe's leader was a coward because he abandoned the village. Growing up in shame, D'leh finds inspiration and his one true love in a blue-eyed girl who appears in the village. She was rescued from a nearby village that was destroyed by marauding warlords riding four-legged demons. The girl comes to be known as Evolet (played by the lovely Camilla Belle), and D'leh does everything to try and win her.
When the brutal warriors return to the region, they kidnap Evolet and most of D'leh's village. So D'leh, driven by his passion for Evolet, leads a small band of men to venture out into the unknown to rescue her. As they leave their icy home (in Europe?) and enter hot deserts (in Egypt?), they encounter new tribes - each distinctly dressed in different Lion King-style African costumes - who've also been attacked by the warriors raiding each village for slaves. When D'leh and his growing army arrive at the desert empire, they find giant pyramids reaching up to the sky. And - ripping a page from the recent 300 - they also find a man presenting himself as a god and using fear to reign over an enslaved populace. The stage is now set for D'leh to reveal himself as the hero we all know him to be.
Roland Emmerich's 10,000 B.C. (Warner Bros.)
For those who remember Emmerich's Stargate (which used time travel to get its characters back to an Egyptian-like ancient empire), this film may feel even more familiar. Maybe Emmerich has a fascination with Egyptian culture and will use any excuse to work it into a story. But if he is so obsessed, why didn't he just call this 2500 B.C. and do it right. But as 10,000 B.C. , viewers just scratch their heads wondering how the warrior nation herded the heavily furred woolly mammoths into the desert and then neatly cut down all their tusks and then harnessed them together to pull perfectly carved giant stones in order to build a pyramid. Did they anesthetize the huge beasts to perform the surgery? And if so how? I can't see them just standing still for what must have taken a bit of time to lop off their tusks. But the clean, uniform cuts are much easier to render for the CGI effects team than to have each animal's tusks crudely broken off. And what kind of tools did they have to pull this feat off? To me, this is the sign of a bad movie, if your mind starts to wonder to questions like this.
The couple sitting next to me praised all the effort that went into designing and making the various tribal costumes but the woman said she kept an alert eye out for wheels, if the film had presumed to give this prehistoric society use of the wheel, she said then she would have walked out. But she seemed willing to forgive the historical anachronisms of having these prehistoric men able to craft intricate jewelry and silk robes, form perfect golden pyramids to top their monuments, and build elegant boats that were all uniform in size, shape and glorious red sails. (Again conformity of design is easier to execute in the CGI world, this means you can cut and paste each ship rather than making 20 unique ones. Okay, cut and paste is an unfair way to describe all the work the visual effects team does.)
Nice kitty. Steven Strait in 10,000 B.C. (Warner Brothers)
There are some impressive vistas in the film, and the red-sailed boats are quite stunning. But in both cases you have to commit to a major suspension of disbelief to enjoy them. The film, however, blows it with the animals. The mammoths come out the best (although they do tend to look like a heard of banthas) but a saber-toothed cat looks no better (and in some ways worse) than the stop motion animation Ray Harryhausen did some fifty years ago. Emmerich's cat, especially when wet, looks like one of those animatronic creatures from Disneyland. And then D'leh is attacked by what I can only describe as rabid-looking giant dodo birds. Maybe they were supposed to be some sort of feathered raptors but they weren't in the least bit scary and when we finally get a good look at them, they turn out to be downright laughable.
Strait, who was in another recent dog The Covenant, gets cast once again more for his abs than his acting ability. But his unimpressive performance is not entirely his fault. He has lame dialogue and then is directed to speak with some weird stilted diction that's meant to convey prehistoric man's early language. A narrator (Egypt's Omar Sharif) leads us through the story and tries to elevate it to mythic stature, as if this were the first great love story of mankind. Cliff Curtis, the fine New Zealand actor, struggles through his role as a tribe elder. If they hadn't shot in his homeland maybe he could have avoided being cast in the film. Despite an attempt to show some ethnic diversity, it is the white D'leh and Evolet who are the center of attention and who prove the hero and heroine of the film. Apparently Anglo domination began back in the ole Paleolithic era.
10,000 B.C. (rated PG-13 for sequences of intense action and violence) isn't so bad that it's fun; it's far too slow, self-important, and well funded to attain any kind of Ed Wood notoriety. As the end credits rolled for what seemed an epoch in itself, I just wondered why anyone would even make a movie like this. Then a friend and fellow critic reduced everything down to such clear-eyed simplicity by reminding me it's because "it makes money." Not necessarily here but in combined overseas and DVD sales, films like this and Jumper and Pirates of the Caribbean 3 clean up overseas because they are big-budgeted, effects driven films that have more bells and whistles than films from other countries. But I have to say that all that is changing. Countries like Hong Kong, China. South Korea and even Russia are delivering effects driven epics of their own that are cleaning up at the box office as well. So maybe in the not too distant future, people like Roland Emmerich won't have such an easy time of pushing such mindless fodder as 10,000 B.C. through the studio systems. I can hope, can't I?.
Companion viewing: Quest for Fire, Clan of the Cave Bear, One Million Years B.C. (the Raquel Welch laffer), Ice Age, Teenage Cave Man, Caveman, The Flintstones (cartoon), Stargate
