10,000 BC by
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If The Patriot and The Day After Tomorrow proved anything (and they didn't really prove much), it's that Roland Emmerich has gone all serious on us. Ever since he got slated for his dunderheaded remake of Godzilla in 1998, the German helmer has tried to straighten up and fly right, making the grounded American War of Independence movie with Mel Gibson in the year 2000 before moving on to global warming with his New York ice age picture four years later. Both tried to add some substance to the director’s typical overblown pyrotechnics and both, predictably, were rotten. Now he's turned his hand to pre-history with the wannabe epic 10,000 BC - and the results are just as poor.
As the title would suggest, we’re long, long ago in a land where chaos rules but make-up artists are plentiful. Cavepeople D'Leh (Steven Strait) and Evolet (Camilla Belle) meet as youngsters and through the years grow to love each other. But the wise woman of their tribe, imaginatively named Old Mother, prophases doom and soon enough a band of raiders arrive in the village to take Evolet into slavery. Together with Cliff Curtis’ mentor figure Tic' Tic (sadly not a small, prehistoric mint), love rival Ka'Ren (Mo Zinal) and young comedy sidekick Baku (Nathanael Baring), D’Leh sets out on an epic quest to save the girl and prove his undying love for her.
Had Emmerich allowed himself to indulge in the daftness of this story perhaps the film would have worked. The prehistory sub-genre is an inherently silly one that relies entirely on big, dumb spectacle and not story. Other directors have recognised this, gleefully playing into that absurdity by building gigantic dinosaur theme parks (Jurassic Park), getting a massive gorilla to rampage through New York and climb the Empire State Building (King Kong) or sticking a hot woman in a tiny fur bikini (One Million Years BC). Emmerich, though, seems to think he’s got something more on his hands and has crafted a film with pretensions of JRR Tolkein rather than Doug McClure.
This is particularly evident in the film‘s turgid middle section. As D’Leh and his team travel the barren lands of prehistoric earth, the film is trying to remind us of Lord of the Rings and the relationships portrayed in it. However, the actors here share little fraternal chemistry and are given nothing but dull epic clichés to work with. They intone meaningfully about protecting their tribe and their belief in the ‘great spirits of the earth’. D’Leh has father issues, believing his parent to be a coward who deserted the tribe, and has to confront his own sense of pride after claiming the tribe’s coveted White Spear of the North with a lie. And even the crucial central love story flounders, lumbered with exchanges as awful as: “my love for you is like that star; it will never go away.” “Never go away?” “Never go away.”
It doesn’t get any better in the final act. Having gathered together an army of tribespeople from different cultures, D’Leh wages war upon the raiders who, we have now learnt, belong to a sort of evil proto-Egyptian pyramid-building civilisation. All mutated faces and creepy long fingernails, these tyrants come on like something from a Frank Miller graphic novel (300 in particular) and their appearance at the end of an otherwise Disneyfied version of history is rather jarring. It’s also rather redundant because, despite their frightening appearance, they are easily beaten, Emmerich’s big build-up jolting to an anti-climax which insists that tyranny can be overthrown with a simple show of solidarity. Sweetly naïve, but ever so self-important.
Thankfully, in between this seriousness, we do get a solid bout of prehistoric (although kid-friendly) carnage. Mammoths stampede, sabre tooth tigers prowl and some terror birds (think giant mutated turkeys reaping their terrible revenge one bloody, ill fated Christmas Day) get to attack in one of the film‘s few impressive set-pieces. But the moments of guilty pleasure escapism are few and far between. 10,000 BC is too dumb to be intelligent and too intelligent to be dumb. It will leave you neither entertained nor enlightened, instead producing only one terrible thought: maybe Godzilla wasn't that bad after all…
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