Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
3/8/08
No
one has defended Roland Emmerich more than I have. Independence
Day is as good a piece of pure popcorn entertainment as has ever been
made. Stargate was another grand crowd pleaser, and The
Day After Tomorrow triumphs over a highly questionable screenplay with
a sheer assault of end-of-the-world spectacle that just dares you to laugh
(I only do so when I'm not watching it). Even lesser works like The
Patriot and Godzilla (which takes almost 90 minutes to get its'
act together before ending with an amazing flourish) have had enough good
qualities to earn my recommendation. So I've always wondered what
so many critics have against the German-born director and his former writing/producing
partner Dean Devlin (other, of course, than their famous inability to take
criticism, as Godzilla's Mayor Ebert will tell you). Until
now. 10,000 B.C., the colossally idiotic prehistoric epic
Emmerich co-wrote with composer Harald Kloser, is everything his worst
detractors have always claimed: hollow spectacle filled with non-characters
in the service of a story that goes back and forth between ridiculous and
ridiculously generic. The recipe: put Stargate, Pathfinder
and Apocalypto in a blender, let the results
sit out in the sun for a week and add woolly mammoths. At times,
10,000 B.C. is so bad, it'll have you looking for the hidden cameras:
even in their absence, the joke is on anybody expecting anything but a
bunch of really good ideas for drinking games.
At
a time so long ago our Narrator (Omar Sharif) informs us that history has
forgotten the facts but will never forget the (made-up) Legend, a young
girl whose village has been slaughtered shows up in the camp of a mountain
tribe struggling to find food. The Old Mother (Mona Hammond), some
kind of psychic, prophecizes that the girl will grow up to be the love
of a hunter who will become a warrior who will lead his people into a new
age, etc. (I'm leaving a lot out: this is a movie filled with VERY
detailed prophecies). Time passes and young D'Leh (Steven Strait),
who has fallen for the now-grown girl Evolet (Camilla Belle) kills a woolly
mammoth (the movie doesn't call them that, but do you really want to waste
any brain cells on hearing words invented to be used by English-speaking
cavemen?) with a mix of luck and skill and becomes a hero to his tribe.
Alas, he feels guilty about the luck part and gives back the special white
spear that came as a prize for his victory, along with the hand of Evolet.
He comes to regret both decisions when a raiding party fleeing lawsuit
by Apocalypto's Mayans attacks and takes
her, along with pretty much everybody from the tribe, leaving only D'Leh,
veteran warrior Tic'Tic (Cliff Curtis) and a few Redshirts to set out on
the Old Mother's guidance to fulfill the prophecy. Their quest makes
them all kinds of new friends with other tribes looking to vanquish their
common foe: a very Mayan civilization using slave labor (even slave
mammoths!) to build temples for a mysterious figure known only as The Almighty
(Tim Barlow). Oh, and there are giant killer chickens.
OK,
maybe they're killer ostriches, I don't know, but the chickens at least
run against 10,000 B.C.'s most frustrating grain: while we
bought our ticket with a certain understanding that we'd see idiot characters
enacting a stupid story (they are, after all, ENGLISH-SPEAKING CAVEMEN),
the ad campaign promises us some Early Man vs. Early Mammal action which
we simply don't get. The mammoths do everything they can to escape
conflict rather than engage it, and the only saber-toothed tiger we see
becomes D'Leh's friend (yes, you read that correctly). I don't know
what the hell the chicken/ostriches were or where they came from, but at
least they were looking for blood!
Because
they're easy to get out of the way quickly, let me start with 10,000
B.C.'s virtues. There's about a minute, late in the game (stolen
lock, stock, and barrel from 300) when the movie
actually springs to life, hits its' marks and is exciting. Kloser
and co-composer Thomas Wander have created a bombastic score which absolutely
refuses to concede that his screenplay is garbage. And the cast,
against all odds, refuses to give in to the madness around them, with Strait
and Curtis in particular delivering star power and dignity in roles where
they are, frankly, named D'Leh and Tic'Tic (my favorite drinking game idea
is to simply wait for D'Leh to shout “Tic'Tic!” and then take that shot).
If Strait can ever get out of movies like this and The Covenant,
he could actually be a star. The effects crew cooked up amazingly
realistic animals (even the chickens) and monuments in the service of a
script that deserves plaster, matte paintings and rubber creatures from
the Dollar Tree.
Now
to the heart of it: this movie is nuts. Every tribe D'Leh meets
has an Official Tribal Prophecy that lays out exactly who is going to be
The Chosen One in such excruciating detail they make Nostradamus look like
Jimmy the Greek. The Old Mother is a truly bizarre invention, harnessing
powers ranging from prophecy to astral projection and raising the dead
with no explanation other than that's just what she does. The Almighty
is impressive enough, wrapped in flowing veils that give his misshapen
body an unnatural contour, but he's backed by a bunch of outrageously femmy
Priests who look like they're just biding time until drag shows are invented,
not exactly generating a lot of menace. The lead heavy, billed as
Warlord (Affif Ben Badra), carries a pathetically emasculating torch for
Evolet that he expresses not through the usual pillaging evil, but by being
so squishy he practically buys her flowers and sings her songs. And
when henchman One Eye (Marco Khan) tries to compensate with some actual
cruelty, his boss shouts him down because his new girlfriend wouldn't like
it. Both actors give their silly roles everything they've got, but
their dialog is subtitled with lines like “Just try it!”, making any effort
at B.C.-school menace futile. Speaking of which, like Pathfinder,
10,000 B.C. offers us some ancient tribes who fly in the face of
all logic and sanity by speaking English specifically so audiences won't
be turned off by two hours of subtitles (“How did you learn our words?”
Tic'Tic asks at one point, bringing up a subject that's best not considered),
only to make the bad guys speak subtitled gibberish. As English-speaking
cavemen battling giant chickens while pursuing prophecies that guide them
like an ancient On-Star system, most any attempt to speak would be futile,
but even so the dialog is hilariously bad. Example: D'Leh saves
that drowning saber-tooth while saying “Please don't eat me after I save
your life.” Sharif was no doubt shaking his head the whole time he
read his hilariously jumbled narration: in fact, some of it's a little
slurred, suggesting he too was taking a shot every time D'Leh yelled “Tic'Tic!”
10,000
B.C. is awful, but it is that special kind of awful where if you really
give in to it you can laugh your ass off for two hours at just how ridiculous
everything you're seeing and hearing is. Emmerich, one of my favorite
directors and the man responsible for one of my favorite movies, has committed
a blunder of epic proportions: one can only hope it is a single misstep
and not a career downturn. But I'm not heartened to learn he'll again
be collaborating with Kloser on the script for his next feature, 2012.
Come on, man, pick up the phone and give Dean Devlin a call: you
guys need each other! |
