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10,000 BC/ 10,000 B.C.
(12A)
© Warner Bros. - all rights reserved
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| Tookey's Rating |
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5 /10
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| Average Rating |
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3.44 /10
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| Starring |
Steven Strait  , Camilla Belle, Cliff Curtis |
| Full Cast > |
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Directed by: Roland Emmerich
Written by: Roland Emmerich, Harald Kloser
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| Tookey's Review |
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| Pro Reviews |
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| Mixed Reviews |
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| Cast |
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| Released: |
2008 |
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| Genre: |
ACTION
ADVENTURE
SO BAD
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| Origin: |
US/ New Zealand |
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| Colour: |
C |
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| Length: |
105 |
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A mammoth self-indulgence.
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Reviewed by Chris Tookey
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Roland Emmerich loves to make big, dumb movies, and though this may not be his biggest, it’s certainly his dumbest. Yes, more preposterous than The Patriot. Goofier than Godzilla. Sillier than Stargate. Dopier than The Day After Tomorrow.
For a start, it’s isn’t clever to try and remake the first two-thirds of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto only a couple of years after Mel did it, but without the thrills or half-decent acting. It’s not bright to employ a narrator (Omar Sharif) who talks a load of pompous rubbish and whose accent is so thick, it’s impossible to understand what he’s on about anyway. And it’s really bone-headed if you’re one of the clumsiest wordsmiths in Hollywood – as Herr Emmerich undoubtedly is - to employ a co-screenwriter with even less imagination, writing ability and knowledge of the paleolithic world.
That said, 10,000 BC has survived a critical mauling in the States to make over 35 million dollars on its first weekend, so I shouldn’t think anything I can write will deter you from seeing it. If you’re in the mood for super-sized trash with no sense of history, geography or humour, 10,000 BC offers up mindless spectacle on an extremely grand scale. And if you can’t wait for the Olympics, there’s quite a lot of people running around, chucking spears.
If you must see it, watch it on a big screen with a walloping great sound system. If you do that, maybe you won’t titter at the gigantic prehistoric turkeys which act as so pertinent a metaphor for the whole film.
The hero of the piece is an indecisive young man called, appropriately enough, D’Leh, pronounced Delay. Played by the justifiably unknown Steven Strait (pictured), quite possibly known to his pals as Dire Strait, D’Leh is a self-doubting outsider in a bare-chested tribe, who speak surprisingly modern English (one warrior even soothes another by saying “I feel your pain”). With their bad dreadlocks and fabulous teeth, they look as if they have wandered over from some hitherto unknown, Rastafarian branch of Abercrombie & Fitch.
The tribe’s way of life is to sit starving in the snow while Omar Sharif intones ponderous gobbledegook, until the manuk (that’s woolly mammoths to you) arrive to alleviate their boredom, and ours. It is only when hunky D’Leh has slain a manuk that he can lay claim to the woman Evolet (Camilla Belle), on whom he has had a crush since childhood, probably because she has discovered eyeliner and blue contact lenses, and looks exactly like Lindsay Lohan in a bad wig.
Amazingly, she reciprocates his feelings, even though they are accompanied by a kitsch orchestral score and an imperfect grasp of astronomy: “You see that star out there, the one that doesn't move? It's like my love for you, in my heart."
But wouldn’t you know it? No sooner has D’Leh laid claim to the woman he loves in his heart than she and most of his tribe are captured by – in Sharif’s momentous words - “four-legged demons”, who turn out disappointingly just to be bald, horse-riding, Arab terrorists, carrying – no doubt – axes of evil. D’Leh and three others of his formerly peace-loving tribe, under the command of someone with the unfortunate name of Dic’Dic, or possibly Tic’Tic (Cliff Curtis), set off in pursuit.
The understandably nervous Tic’Tic carries the white spear – presumably known as Stic’Stic - that represents tribal authority, but in no time he’s been injured and is taken Sic’Sic. Whereupon our hero takes over Tic’Tic’s stic’stic, and Tic’Tic is reduced to being D’Leh’s sidekic’kic.
Over the next interminable hour or so, D’Leh does some derivative Androcles and the Lion schtic’schtic with a jerky-looking sabre-tooth tiger, who turns out to be an overgrown pussycat. Then D’Leh and his buddies get pecked at by a flock of bad-tempered giant turkeys, in a sequence which looks hilariously like Parky’s epic encounter with Emu. The four hunters track the “four-legged demons” over the mountains of New Zealand, through Amazonian jungle, turning left at the Chinese bamboo forest, and across the Sahara desert, until they get to the Nile. As you do.
After what seems like an eternal delay, D’Leh discovers celestial navigation (which, curiously, doesn’t seem to impress anyone) and teams up with various black, oppressed peoples who have been waiting years for a lighter-skinned man to turn up and lead them.
I can’t remember the names of the tribes, but they are essentially the Serious People With Unfeasibly Thick Bones Jammed Into Their Chins, the Black Men Trying To Look Butch Despite Having To Wear Matching Beads and Ra Ra Skirts, and the Shy Guys Hiding Unsuccessfully Behind Bamboo Fence-Masks. Taking his cue from George Bush’Bush, D’Leh leads the united nations of the world against pyramid-building colonialist oppressors, who look like a cross between Ancient Egyptians and the most screamingly camp drag queens you’ve seen outside Stargate. They’re building themselves either a giant tomb or a massive leisure resort – it’s hard to tell precisely which. The real Egyptians didn’t come along until 7,000 years later, but hey, what’s a few millennia between friends?
Just about the only pyramid salesman in the world who could take this white supremacist junk seriously is Roland Emmerich, and boy! does he take it seriously. He and his co-screenwriter Harald Kloser (who also composes the preposterously overblown score) come up with no fewer than three mystical prophecies in one movie, which has to be a record.
Emmerich has an eye for a widescreen picture: there’s one shot here of sailing ships on the Nile that’s almost worth the price of admission in itself. He’s made movies before that I’ve enjoyed, especially Independence Day, which was a lot of fun and had a quartet of engaging caricatures played by Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum, Randy Quaid and Bill Pullman.
Here, though, the characters remain completely uninteresting; we don’t care a fig about the romance at the centre of the movie; various loose ends of the plot are carelessly left dangling; and there’s a ridiculous attempt at the end to invoke New Age mysticism and Erich von Daniken’s theories about earthly rulers arriving from outer space.
10,000 BC is the sort of so-gobsmackingly-terrible-it’s-good experience that can survive any amount of adverse criticism. Purists may bewail its banality, and its spectacular failure to present a convincingly imagined prehistoric world; but its only true purpose is to separate gullible punters from their money. In that respect, if no other, it will probably succeed.
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