Movie Review: 10,000 B.C.

Posted by Nathan Deen (nathan@filmschoolrejects.com) on March 10, 2008

When it comes to Roland Emmerich films, it seems like the bigger the budget he has, the worse his films are. Emmerich has almost outdone himself though with his latest film, 10,000 B.C. The only thing epic about this movie is how much of a disaster it is. If you’ve seen Apocalypto or Pathfinder then there’s no reason to see 10,000 B.C. because it is pretty much a rip-off of both. I’m sure Emmerich intended to create a film with the qualities of the former and instead ended up with a catastrophe that is about as bad as the latter. 10,000 B.C. is an arid wasteland; a visual ostentation that falls far short of impression and a derivative, vacuously written, cliched-riddled mess that has little to do with accurate history or anything remotely original or interesting.

Again, if you’ve seen either of the two films I just mentioned, the plot will sound strikingly familiar. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out which continent the film was taking place on. One minute, we are in a vast, freezing cold mountain range, the next a jungle, and then finally, an endless desert. Basically, a tribe full of hunters is attacked by a larger tribe that kills some of the hunters and takes the rest as slaves. Surviving and not being captured is D’Leh (Steven Strait, 2006’s The Covenant), and a few of his trusted friends who decide to set out on a remarkable journey to rescue their people, including D’Leh’s love interest, Evolet (Camilla Belle, 2006’s When a Stranger Calls)

The bottom line is, given the premise, there’s just no reason for 10,000 B.C. to feel completely unoriginal. It is inexcusable, Mr. Emmerich, that you took plot material from other movies, set it in a different time period, and tried to pass it off as something unique. Would it have hurt to do a little thorough research instead of making it seem like you made the film based on the common, vague ideas most of us have about this time period? Oh, but then even he goes a step further. He and co-writer Harald Kloser take almost every cliche you can think of in modern cinema and arrogantly shove them in the viewers’ faces.

The plot is contrived by ridiculous prophecies that are never fully explained. The hunter tribe we are supposed to care about speaks English while the enslaving tribe speaks a native tongue. All tribes in the film feel like stereotypes and there is not a single interesting individual to be found. The love story between D’Leh and Evolet reminded me of a few scenes from 2007’s August Rush and for a film set in 10,000 B.C., there is a shit load of chintzy dialogue being spattered about. Thankfully, there are some scenes that are so bad they are laughable. For instance, when the god-like leader of the enslaving culture orders for one of the slaves to be sacrificed to the gods, instead of performing some kind of ritual, they simply take the poor fellow and throw him off the side of a pyramid. Above all though, 10,000 B.C. is the first bad movie ever, at least that I know of, to fail to put a CGI sabertooth tiger to good use.

Performances are nowhere to be found among the wide gamut of the picture, unless you consider superb imitations of totem poles to be enough to suffice. How can Emmerich put so much effort and detail into his CGI creatures and completely neglect his own characters? Steven Strait as our protagonist- if you want to call him that because you’ll be hoping for his character’s life to be cut short so you can leave the theater- never rises above the awful make-up, hairstyle, and costume he is wearing. Camilla Belle has almost nothing to do or say throughout the entire picture. The leader of the tribal kidnappers may as well have been played in a cameo by Sylvester Stallone. Everyone else in the supporting cast is so instantly forgettable, you probably won’t remember them or what purpose they served the day after viewing the film.

Aside from the movie being well shot and the special effects living up to their budget, it’s just best if you stay away from 10,000 B.C. altogether. Maybe it’s time that you learned Mr. Emmerich- and this goes for all filmmakers who land a big budgeted action film- you can’t buy a great movie and it takes a lot more than special effects to make one. Although it will no doubt make 10,000 times more money than it should at the box office, 10,000 B.C. is a prime example of what happens when you don’t put the right amount of treatment on the screenplay.

| | Read more articles by Nathan Deen