All right, I’m a sucker for movies with my initials in the title. There’ve been two great movies so titled, ONE MILLION B.C. (1940) and ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. (1966), and I went to see 10,000 B.C. in the hopes that any movie with the audacious image of woolly mammoths hauling stone slabs up a ramp to build a pyramid has got to be, at the very least, inspired. As it turns out, any chances for a third great movie with B.C. in the title are pretty slim (unless someone films my life story :P), given how this new one is sure to kill off what little market there might be for prehistoric genre movies.

The problem with 10,000 B.C. is that it takes itself way too seriously to be the laugh-filled cheesefest it should have been, yet it’s too silly to be taken seriously by anybody. Director Roland Emmerich (whose DAY AFTER TOMORROW was way funnier) never solves the problem of making the material even remotely believable enough to allow the audience to get engaged with it. I like that he threw everything he could think of into it (although he left out what I really wanted to see—dinosaurs and spaceships, although there is a reference to visitors from the skies), but he never managed to create a framework for it that made any sense. And then he hires unknown actors for the leads who are seriously lacking in charisma. The hero is barely distinguishable from most of the other actors. We really don’t care about any of these people or what happens to them. In fact, if our ancestors were as inept as the tribesmen here, I doubt any of us would even be here, since they most likely would have been killed off in short order.

The heaviest lifting, acting-wise, is done by poor Omar Sharif, who narrates the whole thing and has to work overtime at it to keep us apprised of things that Emmerich couldn’t figure out how to simply dramatize.

Granted, as bad movies go, this one’s more watchable than most. It’s not the kind of bad movie you get angry at. It’s got all kinds of cool imagery never seen before in movies and, dare I say it, never to be seen again. Where else are you going to see woolly mammoths alongside pyramids? Or a cuddly saber-tooth tiger poking around a village filled with spear-carrying African warriors. Or rabid carnivorous ostriches???? And it’s got great locations that we haven’t seen before—the movie was filmed in New Zealand, Namibia and South Africa. (The thank-you to South Africa at the end includes the disclaimer that South Africa, as a country, doesn’t support the content of this film. That was the funniest thing in the whole movie. And I was the only one who saw it because I was the only audience member who stayed through the credits.)

But, without humor or, more importantly, wit, the whole show just never takes off as a memorable audience experience. For a Friday night opening night audience, the theater was barely ¼ full. And no one got into the spirit of the thing.

That is fascinating. I have read a couple of reviews that criticized what they saw as the implicit racism of the movie, with its enslaved white(ish) good guys and black(ish) slave-kidnapping bad guys.

Or it may have been because 10,000 B.C. is seen as supporting some version of human evolution (I find it hard to type that without giggling, given what I've read about the movie's actual content - then I stop and shudder at the thought that some teacher, somewhere, someday, will show it to a history or science class). Evolution education has been generating some controversy of late in South Africa, where it seems to be pretty widely rejected, including by teachers (and thank goodness we're past that here in America!).

Nice to see Emmerich and company making a movie that will clear up all kinds of misconceptions on the subject, thus continuing the contribution to public understanding of science that they began with THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW.

EDIT: This reminds me that I recently bought a DVD of Jean-Jacques Annaud's rather wonderful prehistoric adventure film QUEST FOR FIRE from a bargain bin at Barnes & Noble. Hardly a paleoanthropology textbook itself, but an example of how you can make a movie in this genre at once serious-minded and entertaining. So here's a plug for it. I think I'll pull that out soon and rewatch it and listen to the commentaries instead of paying $11 to see 10,000 B.C.

Actually, that's not quite the case. Most of the good guys are black or people of color played by all kinds of ethnic groups. The bad guys are Arabic/Egyptian types, with helpers/henchmen of different races. The heroes from the snowy north (most of whom do not appear to be white actors) at one point rally a bunch of African tribes to their cause--rescuing all the children taken from all their tribes by the horse-riding Arabs, who've taken the kids to be slaves working on the pyramids. So we see a scene of all these different gangs--I mean tribes--assembling in full warrior paraphernalia on the arid plain and they all have different makeup and different costumes, headgear, etc. and all I could think of was Walter Hill's THE WARRIORS. (I'm 100% certain that Emmerich was thinking the same thing.)

The one bit that I think may be a bit on the racist side is the notion that this blue-eyed girl who's rescued by the good guys early on is somehow the chosen one, someone so special that they all have to protect her and make her the queen or something. She fulfills some kind of prophecy. Simply because she has blue eyes and, I guess, white skin. And that she's meant to be the woman of the hero, also played by a white actor. The two leads may be the only white performers in the cast with significant speaking parts.

Cliff Curtis, as the patriarch of the tribe from the snowy north and the hero's mentor, is very good, though. He's of Maori origin yet he usually plays Latinos, blacks, Arabs, etc. He did play a Maori in THE WHALE RIDER. He played the girl's father.

I just caught this -- mainly because I was more in the mood to go out and see something than actually see this, precisely, which sort of broke my own rules for my moviegoing this year, but whatever. Sometimes you just need to get out of the house, y'know? And I couldn't face JUMPER. Or VANTAGE POINT, which has the distinction of playing everywhere although I don't know anyone who's actually seen it. Or two -- two, mind you -- Martin Lawrence comedies.

The influence I haven't seen mentioned is Gibson's APOCALYPTO, this is sort of the poor man's version of that, actually. I am genuinely curious why anyone would greenlight a poor man's APOCALYPTO, I don't exactly recall anyone rushing out to see the rich man's APOCALYPTO, ie, APOCALYPTO.

I really should be a movie producer.

I pretty much agree with Mr. Camp's assessment -- it's bad but not in a fun kind of way, just in sort of a cranky sleepy kind of way, like your Dad interrupted from his post dinner snooze. Movies with

SOME SPOILERS



carniverous ostriches and old women with Psychic Bonds To Our Adventurers The Seem To Manifest Themselves Mainly By A Lot Of Scary Staring should probably not take themselves too seriously. It seems lugubrious in sections and I too didn't care about anyone concerned -- you know, just typing this, if anything it makes APOCALYPTO, which I remember liking with reservations, look a lot better. For example, I remember thinking the frat humor early on in APOCALYPTO was pretty silly -- and it is -- but in retrospect Gibson did avoid the self seriousness that plagues this thing before it gets going.

With a lot of CGI of various strains of believability, a multi-ethnic cast that seems to exist in that famous place Make believe Land, a blind servant that got the crowd laughing when he was trotted out, and the healthiest squad of indigenous peoples you ever did see.

doug

.. . does the original ONE MILLION B.C. (1940) show up on television these days (I supppose they had to add "YEARS" to the title of Hammer's remake to clear up any confusion) - I used to love this story of Tumak (Victor Mature) who leaves the warrior Rock Tribe and falls in with with Loana (Carole Landis) of the Shell Tribe from whom he learns love, the peaceful way of life, and most particularly, proper table manners; perhaps when/if 20th Century Fox gets around to correcting their Hammer film DVD and gives us the extended version, they can stick the original in the package as well . . .

I like the title of this review at Slate.com: "Me Want Good Caveman Movie, Not this 10,000 B.C. crap."

http://www.slate.com/id/2185924/

I've never been a fan of caveman movies... they always seem to be spending too much screen time learning stuff, which tends to get boring. Unless it's the process of being schooled that it's a really bad idea to poke at an Allosaurus with a sharp stick.

Although I do have a fondness for Caveman... which for a movie I haven't seen in over twenty years, I still remember too much of the dialogue.

Turner Classic Movies has shown it in the past couple of years.

I've not see the film, but as avid fan of extinct predators, I find mocking Terror Birds as "rabid carnivorous ostritches" to be as odd as the alleged aversion that somebody at Hammer had to the t-rex, telling When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth animator Jim Danforth "oh, we don't want one of those in the film; they look like bloody poofs, prancing around like women in high heels." (Which is why the main dinosaur in that film is an imaginary quadruped).

Indeed, some paleontologists have theorized that the Terror Birds essentially inherited the bipedal alpha predator niche that t-rex once occupied, although that idea may be as discredited now as the once-held theory that they survived long enough to hunt homo sapiens.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanis_walleri[I][/I]

I'm an avid fan of extinct J-pop idols myself.

http://wiki.theppn.org/Goto_Maki

:P

It's legitimately interesting that they were real things, and not some nonsense Emmerich dreamed up. It doesn't make 'em look any less stupid in the movie, however.

doug

So, do they look the way they're depicted in reconstructions, such as seen in Wikipedia, and in various horror and science fiction novels and short stories since they supplanted raptors as the subgenre's beast du dour over a decade ago, or has Emmerich somehow made them particularly risible? As usually depicted, they're not particularly ostrich-like.

It's fascinating how a window of knowledge can open up. I had no idea these things even existed -- two sentences from Mr. McDowell and a quick Google later, and it turns out you can even be an expert in them.

Follow the link to find a picture of them I found by googling "terror birds movie":

http://www.allmoviephoto.com/photo/2008_10000_bc_007.html.

Whether that looks like a carnivorous ostrich or not seems like a judgement call. It looks like a carnivorous ostrich to me, at least.

doug