Finally, Warner Bros. has produced a movie far more atrocious than their pre-summer release of two years ago, Wolfgang Petersen’s “Poseidon.” Epic movies seem to be in vogue in Hollywood now, and a movie set in prehistory could have been the perfect venue for action, adventure and a whole lot of fun, but woolly mammoths and sabertooth tigers do not save “10,000 B.C.” from being a formulaic, insipid movie that fails even as a passably entertaining popcorn flick.
Roland Emmerich is a competent filmmaker who is no stranger to big Hollywood disaster spectacles, having helmed trite-but-fun guilty pleasures such as “Independence Day,” “Godzilla” and “The Day After Tomorrow.” But in his latest effort, Emmerich takes on a wholly uninspired approach to directing the movie. The film is shot and edited without any distinctive form or flair, as if the production value put into art design and visual effects would make up for Emmerich’s lack of directorial ingenuity.
The supposedly spectacular escapist film’s shoddy script—with numerous plot holes, uninteresting characters and familiar plot beats—makes conventionally shot dialogue exchanges and action scenes worse.
The story follows mammoth hunter D’Leh (Steven Strait), a member of a hunter-gatherer tribe living in 10,000 B.C., who traverses with his mentor Tic’Tic (Cliff Curtis) through dangerous territory on an expedition to rescue his people and kidnapped lover, Evolet (Camilla Belle) from the annihilation of warlords.
Newcomers Strait and Belle both fail to breathe life to their statically written characters. Evolet’s character is an average damsel in distress, and the film’s hero is equally boring. Neither the hero nor heroine in the film—nor anyone for that matter—has a character arc. Even the promising Curtis is lost in the film, no doubt from Emmerich’s shortcoming in guiding performances. The filmmakers seem to think that obnoxious dreadlocks, weird accents and ridiculously blue contacts (Belle) can bring authenticity and interest to the prehistoric characters.
Moreover, there is an extreme corruption in Emmerich’s presentation of the film’s setting, the purported 10,000 B.C. There is nothing wrong with the decision to make a romanticized interpretation of history, and there are times when cinematic license should be taken for an idea to hold up on the big screen, but the film is rife with flat-out anachronisms and completely unauthentic portrayals of mankind’s primitive ancestors. Why would hunter-gatherers be running around half naked in the winter?
No one over the age of 13 would enjoy this absurd film, and it is rated PG-13, so technically, this movie should not be seen by anyone. The visual effects are nothing ground-breaking, the music is forgettable and what should have been a visually beautiful movie with a large scope is nothing more than bad actors running around in barren, boring landscapes. With the best aspect of the film being its abundance of unintentional humor “10,000 B.C.” is dull and will do a great disservice to any poor movie-goer who has the misfortune of mistaking it for a fun time.
