10,000 B.C. DVD > Reviews > Prehistoric Pap

Author's product rating:   

Did you enjoy it?	Hated it
Story	Very weak
Characters / Performances	Weak
Special Effects	Good
Soundtrack	Weak

Advantages:	Some good special effects .
Disadvantages:	Dreadful acting and even worse writing and direction .

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

In a remote mountain village, hunter D'Leh has found the love of his life in the beautiful young Evolet. When a band of marauding warlords raid the village and take Evolet D'Leh and a small band of hunters give chase. Their pursuit takes them to the ends of the earth to find her. They must do battle with prehistoric creatures before finding themselves in a lost civilisation. Their fate lies in a city of great pyramids built to appease a living god who has enslaved their people.

Roland Emmerich is best known for his big, stupid special effects-laden movies but here he's really outdone himself. If you thought "Independence Day" was brainless, you haven't seen anything yet. At least that movie had a semblance of a story, a handful of decent actors and a sense of humour. The problem with this one is that it has no idea what it's talking about but takes itself seriously anyway.

I knew it was going to be bad the moment the chewily-accented narration kicked in. When a film features a voice-over it usually means the visuals aren't good enough to carry the story or that there isn't enough story to make sense. It's a last ditch attempt to give meaning to badly pasted together series of set pieces. It feels like Emmerich turned up at his locations in New Zealand and Namibia without a script and just started shooting establishing shots he hoped to link together in some sort of quest narrative. We seem to spend half the movie following groups of characters in a helicopter instead of telling a story. And all the stunning vistas in the world can't make up for a lack of narrative. Simply cutting back and forth between D'Leh and Evolet in their respective groups isn't enough to create tension or establish their love for one another.

These bouts of wandering are interspersed with big set pieces, most of which involve impressively rendered computer-generated mammoths. You can see every coarse individual hair moving separately. They have a good sense of weight and movement too. So it's a shame they aren't integrated better into their surroundings. You can tell they aren't really there when interacting with (i.e. trying to step on) the humans. The same is also true of the otherwise impressive CGI sabre-tooth tiger. It works better when the whole environment is digital, as with the proto-Egyptian city, as long as you don't look at the finer details. The same can be said of the acting, which is consistent throughout, but not in a good way. There's way too much melodrama here and not enough character development. So you'll constantly find yourself laughing or groaning at the stupid people on screen as they go through their tedious trials and tribulations. Either that or you'll be wondering why a load of cavemen have such perfect teeth and skin or precisely groomed beards. It makes the hundred-and-ten minute running time feel interminable.

It feels like Emmerich and co-writer Harald Kloser put together a grab bag of ideas from other places to create this woeful excuse for a screenplay. To say that it's mixed up is an understatement. If it isn't Daniel in the lion's den, it's Moses freeing his people from tyranny and leading them out of Egypt. There's a scene stolen directly from "Apocalypto" where one character is trapped in a flooding pit. And suggestions that the gods are otherworldly is right out of "Stargate". Not to mention the historical accuracy that's right out of "One Million Years BC". Firstly the characterisation is abominable. The players are so poorly sketched I'm not even sure they count as stock characters. D'Leh is the social outcast turned hero of the tribe. Evolet is more a plot device than a person as damsel in distress. Not only does Tic Tic have a name that sounds like a twitchy sweet, but he's a two-dimensional hunter/warrior/father figure without any perceptible personality. But at least he's not as much of a redundant plot device as tribe seer Old Mother. All the other young hunters such as Baku and Ka'Ren are just there to make up the numbers.

The story such as it is makes precious little sense. The narration tries to make it sound like a fable passed down through generations, but there isn't enough of a folklore aspect for it to ring true. And those aspects there are feel really cheddary because we've seen them all before, especially the all seeing soothsayer that predicts everything in her "tellings". It's a pointless device as you never get to know any of the other villagers so you don't need to be reminded they're there while we're following the leads. There's a subplot about one of the marauders lusting after Evolet that never goes anywhere, much like his rivalry with a one-eyed henchman. There are suggestions the living gods are either aliens or from Atlantis but this is never explored. There are a whole slew of different tribes that join D'Leh and chums in their assault on the city but their differences come down to costume because we're never properly introduced to them. The writers are more interested in having the tiny lead group compress thousands of years of human discovery into a few days. So they learn about astral navigation, horse-riding, industry, architecture and agriculture by the time the film ends. It's so ludicrous it's hilarious. Until you realise you've spent money on a ticket to see this crap.

In reference to the dialogue, to quote Harrison Ford "You may be able to type this s***, but you sure as hell can't say it." The character names sound weird for a start, the voice-over narration treats the audience as if they were five years old and everyone speaks in melodramatic slices of cheese. There's one particularly awful scene where Tic Tic talks about circles of influence and responsibility in the naffest of all possible ways. But at least he isn't talking about love without showing it, or randomly renaming creatures like mammoths, or speaking of "tellings" when "prophecy" would work better.

To say Steven Strait is a bit wooden is like saying the sea is a little damp. As D'Leh he's entirely expressionless throughout and it's hard to tell if there's anything at all going on behind his eyes. He has zero chemistry with his on-screen love interest and doesn't even handle himself that well in the fight scenes. The most that can be said for him is that he doesn't mind tromping through snow or sand wearing very little.

Camilla Belle was clearly cast for her looks rather than her acting ability as Evolet. It wouldn't matter as the character has hardly anything to do other than look tragic. But Belle could at least look like she's thinking when standing around waiting to be rescued. She doesn't even look interested in the alleged love of her life. Cliff Curtis is disappointing as the oddly named Tic Tic, doing little more than hitting his marks and delivering his overripe lines. He's po-faced in a desperate attempt to bring some much needed gravitas to the movie. But he's an abject failure in that regard and only holds his own in the fight scenes. The rest of the supporting cast appear to be hamming it up just to get noticed amongst the CGI. Serious offenders include Mona Hammond (Blossom from "Eastenders") as Old Mother and Omar Sharif going melodramatic as the narrator.

The original music by Harald Kloser and the unfortunately named Thomas Wanker goes for loud brass and string arrangements in an attempt to give the film an epic quality. And to ensure you don't fall asleep, there are lots of loud pounding drums throughout that try to excite the audience but feel melodramatic. This is also true of the chanting that occurs whenever we're supposed to be awestruck. It's yet another over-the-top element that doesn't do the movie any favours.

"10,000 BC" is popcorn filmmaking at its worst. Roland Emmerich is so besotted by his computer-generated animals that he forgets to build a story for them to appear in. No matter how good the special effects are, they can't make up for the slapdash direction and writing or the wooden performances. Sidestepping the "so bad it's good" category, it's just rubbish. Unless you really, really want to see those mammoths, avoid this pile of tripe at all costs.