10,000 BC – 0 out of 5
I remember 10,000 BC being advertised in 2008, a few years after I graduated college. It didn’t look interesting to me and by that point Roland Emmerich’s films have sorta ran their course for me. Yes, Independence Day is great and I even enjoy his take on Godzilla (in a campy way) but, overall, all his movies felt formulaic to me. I never gave the feature another thought, with the exception being a friend wanting to see it but I passed on joining him. I’m not entirely sure why I thought of it recently but I decided that I would give the film a shot. I thought that maybe this could have been a surprisingly entertaining feature but, instead, it was just an incredibly boring one.
In 10,000 BC, a small tribe that is struggling to survive on the dwindling mammoth population called the Yagahl finds a young named Evolet (Camilla Belle) who survived the massacre of her people by what the tribe’s elder calls “four-legged demons.” As time passes, the chief’s son; D’Leh (Steven Strait), falls for Evolet and eventually proves his valor as a hunter as he kills a mammoth all by himself. The victory is short lived as mysterious riders raid their camp, enslaving some and killing others. During the attack, Evolet is captured by a man calling himself Warlord (Affif Ben Badra) and is taken to Egypt to work as a slave for a man called The Almighty (Tim Barlow). Now D’Leh must team with his mentor Tic’Tic (Cliff Curtis) and gather neighboring tribes and stop the slavers and save Evolet.
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| You know how films like Apocalypto set the stage by having the entire film be told through a non-English language and it really made for an immersive feel? Yeah, this one didn't do that. |
For some reason, the surface concept of this movie reminded me of the old days of movie making. You really don’t see a lot of films about primitive man and the idea that there would be a whole movie about “cave men” from an era long past just felt like a throwback to the silent film era. That feeling, however, was only on the surface because as you dive deeper into this one, you realize it’s not that but, instead, is a very sloppy love story and has a final act that feels like director Roland Emmerich was trying to recall his great feature from 1994; Stargate. At a concept level, 10,000 BC isn’t a bad idea and seeing a young warrior rally tribes to his cause in order to free slaves and save his beloved could actually be a decent movie. The thing that made none of it work for me was that each and every element felt dry and boring and it made it impossible to get invested.
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| The description of those rocks in the background was the most exciting part of the film...and that was just me talking out loud while I watched it. |
The problems I had with 10,000 BC extended beyond the inaccuracies that historians had with the film but rather from storytelling and technical aspects. To put it bluntly, the special effects, for the most part, weren’t very good in this movie. Granted, I did see exceptions to that like with the mammoths and saber-toothed tiger that was threatening to drown in man-made trap. Even the sweeping shots of Egypt looked realistic. These moments look genuinely good but for those moments that worked, there were more than a few that didn’t. For example, there are a lot of shots that are obviously green screened and the characters look out-of-place when compared to the background.
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| I would put a reference to Ice Age here but I feel if I do another sequel of those films will get magically made. |
There’s also a sequence where we see the saber-toothed tiger out of the trap in the daylight and it looks incredibly fake and awkward. Matters are only made worse when D’Leh has a stare-down with the beast and actor Steven Strait’s eye line is off and he looks more like he’s looking into the distance rather than looking at the computer generated creature in front of him. That’s always the tough bit when dealing with effects that aren’t physically on set. It’s hard to sell the idea that you are looking at something that’s effectively not there. Some actors can do it and some just cannot. When you have the ones who can’t, it can kill the reality the product it is trying to create.
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| Uh oh, a PS2 graphic has come to life and is in the movie! |
Sometimes weak special effects can be something I can look beyond if the content is strong. However, in the case of 10,000 BC, I found nothing about it strong or captivating. I previously stated that the concept of the story is decent enough but the whole thing feels phoned in with a lethargic cast and barebones writing. No one in the cast is terrible at what they are doing but no one really feels like they are giving much effort. For example, Cliff Curtis is in the movie and I think he’s an excellent actor but he doesn’t look like he’s really trying. Omar Sharif is the film’s narrator (having a narrator already is highlighting the weak writing because it screams that the entire scope and backstory can’t be fleshed out with the characters and plot) and even he sounds like he’s just going through the motions. Even the film’s hero, D’Leh, doesn’t feel that important because Steven Strait isn’t really commanding and doesn’t have much of a presence on the screen.
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| He's also a little too ruggedly handsome to be a caveman. |
The worst offender, however, is Camilla Belle as Evolet. My assumption is this has to do more with the fact that there’s pretty much nothing in the script for Belle to clamp onto as Evolet as she literally looks blank the entire film. Writers Emmerich and Harald Kloser dropped the ball with her as she feels important being a survivor of a massacre but is essentially just set dressing for the rest of the feature. Another attempt is made to make her important because her presence ends up meaning something to The Almighty but, by the time this arrives, it feels tacked on and we’ve already watched her pretty much do nothing for a majority of the film. I’m not going to claim that all the actors were bad because that really didn’t seem to be the case. It just felt like no one was really trying because of the one-dimensional approach to the characters.
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| This is basically the only reaction Belle was capable of because the character of Evolet is so poorly written and developed. |
Ultimately, the true killer of the film is the story and script. None of the characters have any depth to them, so I couldn’t get invested in their journey. Then the journey itself never feels like it has any sense of urgency to it, so the entire time I felt like I was just a very, very passive viewer of the whole ordeal. Finally, once the story hits Egypt, the movie suddenly felt like a prequel to Stargate…only without the Stargate…or the interest and charm that film has. Everything about the story, plot and script felt like it was just giving out the bare minimum of what was required to get a feature length film and that made the whole thing unbelievably boring. Having characters that have no depth to them basically created an emotionless time suck that lacks thrills and intrigue. Even the action scenes felt mundane and bland.
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| "Hey, those Egyptian themes we played with in Stargate was cool, let's do that again... only this time in a bad movie." |
I’m not going to deny that 10,000 BC might have been a decent movie in the proper hands but when you have a guy who is synonymous with making the same disaster film over and over again, having a feature that doesn’t involve any modern day landmarks being utterly obliterated feels destined for failure from the get go—I will say, however, that I’m shocked Emmerich showed some restrained and didn’t somehow come up with an idea that involved the pyramids being decimated by a fictitious prehistoric beasts. With a lackluster script and a cast mirroring that amount of effort with their performances, this film was just a chore to sit through and ultimately proved to be an incredibly forgettable movie.
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