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10,000 BC
Sometimes legends last longer than Truth. I paraphrase, but that's more or less the first thing we hear from the narrator - Omar Sharif, no less - as we settle down with our popcorn. It's a tip that Roland Emmerich doesn't aspire to pre-historical accuracy, or perhaps a get-out clause to answer those pedants who complain that putting dinosaurs in the same time period as a certain landmark construction site on the Nile is quite a stretch. One of many in fact. Herr Emmerich is not in the reality business. His last four pictures were Independence Day, Godzilla, The Patriot and The Day After Tomorrow. All of them made over $100 million at the US box office, and in most cases, much more. He makes big, bold blockbusters; dumb fun, if we're lucky. 10,000 BC just about qualifies, but the dumb outweighs the fun - so much so, you could say the dumb is the fun. D'Leh (Steven Strait) is an orphan child of a curious mountainous tribe, hunters with a taste for mammoth meat. But their way of life is imperiled by the encroaching ice age, so says the village soothsayer (Emmerich evidently hasn't got climate change out of his system). Her prophecy speaks of a warrior who will vanquish the four-legged demons (men on horseback), rescue the lovely Evolet (Camilla Belle) from her kidnappers, and reveal to the tribe a new sustainable way of life� Could D'Leh be that hero? He has his doubts, but with his crusty dreadlocks, perfect teeth and surfer dude body he certainly seems like the only viable candidate. He also fancies Evolet something rotten, so that's a start. "See that light in the sky, the one that doesn't move," he tells her, pointing to the morning star. "That is how I feel for you in my heart." (Again, I'm paraphrasing, but you get the picture: he's no caveman in the romance department.)
The rowdy preview audience I saw this with wasn't really up for this soppy love story or D'Leh's identity crisis. It's only when Emmerich produced a herd of stampeding mammoths that he got the crowd onside. Even then, though the CGI creatures are impressive, the action sequence was so choppily edited it was hard to follow just what was going on. The story is Apocalypto redux: D'Leh is doing the chasing, but the villainous Arab-looking bandits are slave traders feeding a building programme even more ambitious than the Mayans'. The geography is about as convincing as the history. The journey takes from snowy mountains to equatorial rain forest to the Sahara desert and the Nile, but it wouldn't matter if these environments didn't have such a Disneyland atmosphere. Perhaps they strayed into Jurassic Park on their travels? A run-in with a large, surprisingly loyal saber-tooth tiger (or "Spear Tooth", as the local African agriculturalists have it) confirms how shamelessly Emmerich means to plunder myth, bible lore and the annals of Hollywood hokum to cobble together his own prefabricated legend. You'll find a bit of the Old Testament here, Peter Jackson there, some 300, a spot of Gladiator, and Joseph Campbell all over the place.
The trouble with this pick-n-mix approach to reality is that it sacrifices authenticity for spectacle. On this showing it's a poor trade: the characters ring false; there's no suspense; no conviction, just mounting disbelief as the show gets sillier and sillier. This isn't an actors' film, obviously, but even on the action front it's mostly tepid. It does muster a bit of computer-generated scale, we'll give it that. And it's every bit as cheesy as could be. But as far as legends go, I can't see it enduring 10 minutes, let alone 10,000 years. There's nothing here to beat the memory of Raquel Welch and her furry bikini, and that's the honest truth. Tom Charity 
More information about 10,000 BC » Critics' Reviews
Empire
Undeniably spectacular... Entertainingly mad, rip-snorting throwback to vintage Saturday matinee fare, with all the swell set piece thrills state-of-the-art technology can throw at it Hollywood Reporter 10,000 BC works just fine as an action Western with handsome actors in striking costumes and a few CG predators, which are giddy fun Sight and Sound An early mammoth-hunting sequence... is genuinely impressive, with CGI attending to each wind-ruffled, pachydermic hair Members' ReviewsReviews Voted Most HelpfulMost Recent Reviews |
