First, allow me to boil 10,000 B.C.’s plot
down into a few sentences. The movie’s protagonist, D’Leh
(Steven Strait), is a young hunter of an ancient era who plunges
into a dangerous expedition after his tribe is ravaged by a
group of warlords. He takes on this conquest because his
childhood love, Evolet (Camilla Belle), was captured by the
warlords, presumably to eventually be sold into slavery or used
for sex. With many fellow men in tow, D’Leh eventually teams up
with another ruined tribe to rescue Evolet. Upon tracking her,
the group discovers that the warlords have taken Evolet and her
fellow captors to a foreign empire, one in which a sacrificial
belief in God dominates cultural opinion. Evolet is one of many
prisoners who are due to be sacrificed for the Almighty.
Take a second to digest the story that I’ve just explained.
It seems like it could be pretty easily told by an experienced
director, right? Right. There are no abstract themes or obscure
metaphors involved that could potentially complicate matters,
are there? Certainly not. And yet, despite its utter
elementariness, director Roland Emmerich (who last helmed 2004’s
catastrophic The Day After Tomorrow) somehow turns
10,000 B.C. into an utterly incomprehensible mess. Even
within the mold of a ridiculously simple structure, loose
story-threads are left to dangle as the film’s credits roll.
Even though their characters are entirely basic, leads Strait
and Belle can’t even manage to make them seem human. Even though
its title establishes a setting, the movie’s senses of
place and time are completely blurred. If the empire that D’Leh
and crew discover is really Egypt, as the set decoration would
suggest, then writers Emmerich and Harald Kloser clearly didn’t
care about the fact that the Wooly Mammoth and the Saber-Tooth
Tiger never lived in Africa when they decided to include them in
the movie. (Come to think of it – did the Egyptian Empire [or
people, for that matter] even exist in 10,000 B.C., anyway?)
Sure, there are lots of impressive special effects to
marvel at as the movie unfolds (a Wooly Mammoth hunt featured in
the first act is particularly striking), but so what? Dazzling
CGI is the norm in Hollywood nowadays, and just because a studio
is willing to spend in excess of $100 million making a movie
doesn’t mean that viewers should embrace that movie. In fact,
audiences should be quite perturbed by the fact that the concept
of storytelling is being progressively ignored because it can
easily be hidden underneath flashy visuals. Still, even if I am
outraged by its insipidness, there is one thing that I can
appreciate about10,000 B.C: its lack of depth allows me
to get away with writing hardly anything about it. (My time is
better spent dissecting more challenging pieces of art.) Just as
the picture concludes on a note of complete emptiness—after a
painstakingly-long 109 minutes, mind you—so will this review.
-Danny Baldwin, Bucket Reviews
Review Published on: 3.6.2008
Screened on: 3.5.2008 at the Mann Chinese 6 in Hollywood,
CA.
