By Josh Moss
There are no fewer than 10,000 problems with director Roland Emmerich’s disastrous, prehistoric epic10,000 B.C., open Friday, March 7. Not that his past duds (The Day After Tomorrow comes to mind) were insightful stories, but at least they provided a platform for nifty special effects. This time around? Not so much. Even the confrontation with a saber-toothed tiger that’s touted in the trailer looks worse than what most of us have seen on the new Xbox.
The film’s summer 2007 release date was pushed back a couple times — a sure sign of a classic — and, unfortunately, nobody had the wherewithal to let this sucker go extinct. It’s somewhat of a diluted version of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto that chucks historical accuracy out the window and suffers from zero sense of urgency and a PG-13 rating. Fool’s Gold provides more tension. And we’re not asking for a series of decapitations. But when a spear plunges through somebody and he crumples to the ground, said spear should not vanish!
D’Leh (played by the unknown Steven Strait) is the main character. We meet him as a child (played by Jacob Renton) in — we’re guessing here — 10,025 B.C. His father leads a band of hunter-gatherers with dreadlocked hair who live high in an unnamed, snowy mountain range. They kill mammoths for food. Eventually, D’Leh’s dad abandons his people — or does he have hidden motives? — and the other kids pick on his boy, calling him “the son of a coward.”
That doesn’t bother D’Leh too much, though, because he’s got a crush on Evolet (played by the relatively unknown Camilla Belle) and proves that lame pick-up lines still existed thousands of years ago. “That light is like you in my heart. It will never go away,” he says, gazing at a star in the sky. Unfortunately, it seems chicks also went for this crap back then. All the while, a narrator explains how D’Leh and Evolet will grow up to fulfill a prophecy.
Fast-forward to 10,000 B.C., and a group of dudes from a riverbank civilization arrive on horseback, err, “four-legged demons” and ransack the hunter-gathers’ village, killing some and capturing, among others, Evolet. D’Leh, of course, decides to rescue her and heads off with a few pals, recruiting more tribes along the way. The resulting showdown disappoints.
As people die during the journey, not one of the actors possesses the talent to pull off the fake tears and emotional reactions Emmerich’s hasty script desires. And even during the scenes that are supposed to be suspenseful — like when unrealistic, computer-generated, dinosaur-like ostriches chase D’Leh and his people through a jungle — Emmerich isn’t above one of the characters falling from a tree and catching a branch in the crotch.
Not to quibble, but even the props and costumes — from D’Leh’s white spear to the bamboo masks that one tribe wears — look as if somebody purchased them from a Hollywood garage sale or collected the rejects from the new Indiana Jones flick. Honestly, the only recommendable things in 10,000 B.C. are — wait for it — Belle’s eyes. They’re really…blue.
By the time D’Leh gives his predictable (and uninspiring) pre-battle speech in a desert and the convenient and inexplicable plot twists start piling up, we don’t even care if he saves Evolet. Instead, we wish they wouldn’t have met in the first place. Then maybe Emmerich wouldn’t have made this movie.
