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"10,000 B.C.": Prehistoric Disaster

By Daniel Montgomery

Friday, March 7, 2008

At the screening I attended, there were cheers and applause. I wondered, what movie did this audience think it was watching? As far as I could tell, the one on the screen was ‘10,000 B.C.’, a goofy, preposterous, and leaden action film that plays like “National Geographic Presents ‘300.’” No, they couldn’t be responding to this film, because there is nothing in it worth responding to. It doesn’t inspire applause. It doesn’t even inspire the outrage needed to hurl a tomato. Save your produce. Eat the tomato, skip the movie.

The director is Roland Emmerich, who specializes in big special effects pictures, some pretty good (‘The Day After Tomorrow’), some pretty bad (‘Godzilla’). This is another extravaganza, but distinguishable from the others by how bad it looks. The Internet Movie Database reports its budget at $75 million, but I can’t see where it was spent. The editing is choppy. The cinematography is drab, sometimes grainy or underlit. The special effects are cut-rate. There’s a scene of the golden top of a pyramid tumbling down the side, and it’s one of the worst effects shots I can remember. It’s in jumpy slow motion, like there are frames missing, or like it’s downloading into the projector from YouTube and hasn’t finished buffering.

The story, though it’s generous to call it a story, is a wasted opportunity. Screenwriters Emmerich and Harald Kloser take us back to ten thousand years before the birth of Christ only to show us a dopey hero on a quest to rescue his mopey girlfriend from a band of hokey villains. Is this the best they could come up with? Was there no wonder to be found in this time period? No insights into how people lived? The hero is D’Leh, pronounced “delay,” known in Native American cultures as Took-You-Long-Enough. He’s played by Steven Strait, best known for looking good without a shirt on in ‘The Covenant’. He’s frequently bare-chested in this film as well, except this time he seems to have stumbled into the ‘Battlefield Earth’ makeup department and came out looking like a cross between Josh Brolin and Bob Marley.

His girlfriend is Evolet (Camilla Belle), who it is foretold will be betrothed to the hunter who pierces a mammoth’s heart. D’Leh does, sort of — the mammoth actually runs into his spear, but never mind. Not long after the hunt, Evolet is kidnaped by a band of warlords so over-the-top evil they’d be considered implausible in a silent comedy. Thus begins D’Leh’s journey to rescue her.

But where exactly does this story take place? D’Leh’s tribe is described in the press notes only as a “remote mountain tribe.” And when he hunts down his beloved, he leaves his snowy home, crosses a mountain, drops into a tropical jungle, and emerges in the African desert, before arriving in Egypt, or an Egypt-like place where they build pyramids. The end credits report that the film was shot on location in New Zealand, South Africa, and Namibia —that’s one hell of a walk. No wonder D’Leh has to invent star navigation just to get there.

The film is beyond silly, and it doesn’t even qualify as good camp, because it isn’t enough fun. There’s an old, revered hunter named Tic’Tic — if they called him Tic Tac they would have had something — who delivers a speech about leadership. From what I understood, one man draws a circle. Another man draws a bigger circle. And the last man draws a really big circle. It’s the Fable of the Concentric Circles. All D’Leh needs is a really big compass with a really long pencil, and he’s all set. Then there is the attack of the giant ostriches, which is interrupted by a guy getting hit in the crotch. And a saber-toothed tiger, which doesn’t eat D’Leh like any sensible tiger would because he was kind enough to save the creature from drowning. By the end, the film makes a last stab at being taken seriously, when D’Leh makes a speech that confuses him for Braveheart, fights a battle that confuses him for Leonidas, and saves the day in what confuses itself for a movie.

I looked at my watch after the last scene, expecting to make an observation about what a bloated two-and-a-half hours it was, but no. The film clocks in at about 100 minutes; it just feels endless. That running time is followed by more than ten minutes of end credits, during which scrolls a long, long, long list of names. Presumably, all of them received paychecks for their contributions. Since apparently none of it was spent to make the movie watchable, I hope it went to a good cause. As penance, every single person on that list should volunteer a day of their time at a soup kitchen. Imagine: ten minutes worth of scrolling names doing their part to feed the hungry. They’ll be better for it. Society will be better for it. And then, maybe then, we can forget this movie ever happened.