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10,000 B.C.
Warner Bros. Pictures, 109mins, PG-13
Written and Directed
by Roland Emmerich
Once upon a time, there was a famously bad movie called “One Million
Years BC” and it featured two wonders of the era it was made: Raquel
Welch in a fur bikini, and Ray Harryhausen's animated dinosaurs. It
turns out it was a remake of a 1940 fantasy with the word “Years”
removed with Victor Mature starring.
Obviously, it's laughably silly [unless you're into creationism] to
think of cavemen fighting dinosaurs, but kids were less
sophisticated back in 1966, and grownup paleontologists weren't
particularly interested in T. Rexes and their ilk back then.
Well, today they are,
and nobody in their right minds would put people in the same frame
as a T-rex. Mammoths and Similodons are a different matter, so
Roland Emmerich decided to remove two orders of magnitude from the
title, and set this third version of the film at the end of the
Pleistocene. No self-respecting twelve year old would object to
cavemen fighting sabertooths, right? Right.
However, it would be nice to have gotten some geography right.
It's 10,000 BC, and the orphaned caveman D'Leh (Steven Strait) is in love
with the beautiful Evolet (Camilla Belle), but according to the
omnipotent narrator(Omar Sharif), he cannot have her until he slays
a “mammuk” [big hairy elephant], which he kind of does, but he
cannot live with the fact that it was to some extent an accident, so
he gives her back to elder Tic Tic(Cliff Curtis) and wait for the
geological epoch to end, as shaman Old Mother(Mona Hammond) has
predicted. Then the “four legged demons” Civilized slavers, show up,
kidnap Evolet, and it's up to D'Leh and Tic Tic to go rescue her
[and several other people who aren't particularly interesting
romantically].
So, while in Northern
Europe, they go up the mountain, and coming down, they wind up in
darkest Africa, where D'Leh fights a sabertooth [which was only
found in the Americas], which proves to
Baku(Nathanael Baring) that he is the one prophecized to save the
world from the “four legged demons.”
The plot doesn't matter very much. The bad guys are from Atlantis
and are building the pyramids with giant “mammuks” and thousands of
slaves. What matters is the Computer generated effects, which are
actually quite good. The rest is a complete muddle, and is one of
those films which is best seen stoned. It'll make it watchable.
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