10,000 B.C. (2008)
NETFLIX SYNOPSIS: Fierce mammoth hunter D’Leh (Steven Strait) sets out on an impossible journey to rescue the woman he loves (Camilla Belle) from a vicious warlord and save the people of his village. While venturing into unknown territories, D’Leh and his fellow warriors battle dangerous beasts and discover an amazing new civilization. Roland Emmerich directs this prehistoric epic full of thrilling action and adventure.
REVIEW: My God, one can only sit back and marvel in awe at the sheer, spectacular badosity of it all. A movie made for people who have never seen any other movies before, since it rips off just about every good movie ever made. Let’s see, off the top of my head, “Apocalypto,” “Jurassic Park,” “Last of the Mohicans,” “2001,” “The Road Warrior,” any number of classic Westerns, as well as the Bible and quite a few fairytales. It’s a hodge-podge, taking various of the best elements from better films, dumbing everything down and jumbling them all together into something they think is a story. The movie as a whole feels like one of those sculptures created out of bits of trash from a junk-pile, except that whole is not greater than the sum of its parts, it’s less.
This is lazy filmmaking; there’s a scene where the various tribes have banded together and are going to cross the harsh desert to find their adversaries. Of course we know they’re going to get lost and be at death’s door, then finally find their way out just as they’re all about to perish. But we don’t get that journey, instead we get a brief scene that lasts about 10 seconds of some of them dying, then bang! - they miraculously find their way outta there the next minute. It’s like the filmmakers are saying “Yeah, we all know what’s going to happen, blah-blah, why bother showing it? Let’s move on to the next cliche. This one doesn’t have enough action to hold your interest.”
The dialog, oh my. Oh my my my. Again, just banal pieces of other films thrown together for effect. At one point the (terribly hackneyed) narrator actually uses the term “…many moons passed…” The tribes have all kinds of cutesy substitute names that are supposed to make them sound authentic - a winding river is “The Snake”, a Mammoth is called a “Mamut” or something like that, and so on. The writers just arbitrarily pick certain phrases and names and insert some like-sounding expression or trite metaphor and expect it to come across as a convincing language of these ancient people. This is most unfortunate since at other times their speech sounds quite modern; I really wouldn’t have been that surprised to hear one of the tribal brothers call another “dude.”
NF Rating: 1/10 of Star, for the hot ingenue.
Harold
