10,000 B.C.

Year of Release: 2008
Genre: Fantasy / Adventure
Rating: PG-13 for sequences of intense action and violence.
Director: Roland Emmerich
Starring: Steven Strait, Camilla Belle, Cliff Curtis, Joel Virgel

Date Of Review: April 2008

“10,000 B.C.” was meant to be an event movie but all it became was an epic misfire. How did it all go so horribly wrong? Well for openers, the script and the performances are both lackluster and the narrative is a complete and utter mess. The story is extremely poor and offers nothing fresh or original; it is no more than a revenge and rescue film that lacks any real excitement. In a simple wrap-up, the plot sees a village get raided, people are killed and captured, the lead character’s true love is kidnapped and he sets out to rescue her, travelling through rugged terrain along the way.  When he eventually tracks her down he finds that she is being held captive by a tribe that is using slaves and wooly mammoths to build their pyramids. The film’s primary attribute is its cinematography.  The rugged scenery and wooly mammoths are a plus but the prehistoric novelty factor wears off very quickly and anything that is worth watching you have already seen in the trailer. The visuals may be fine but the film moves at such a snail’s pace, that all the proceedings are unfortunately un-engaging.

“10,000 B.C.” is riddled with problems and one of its major flaws happens very early on. A good film manages to grab the viewer early in the piece. Unfortunately, this film kicks off with a disastrous pre-credit sequence that has to be seen to be believed. It is so poorly conceived that it should have been left on the cutting room floor. It’s meant to introduce us to this prehistoric world and the characters that inhabit it but instead it bores us to death with a silly narrative by Omar Sharif. The pre-credit is nothing more than a jumble of words and scenes that make very little sense and annoys rather than engages.  When the rampaging mammoths finally come on the screen, after about 10 minutes of nonsense, the film has already lost the viewer.  It would have been better to begin the film with the mammoth stampede rather than set it back behind the 8-ball. The mammoth sequence is without doubt the most exciting action set-piece in the entire film and nothing that comes after it can equal it. What the film needed was at least two or three more sequences of this caliber. It would have smartened up the pace of the film and brought everything else into gear, compensating for its other shortcomings.  Instead, later in the film we are treated to another set-piece that sees the lead actor help release a saber-tooth tiger from a murky pit that he is also trapped in. The whole sequence is tedious, far-fetched and simply stupid.    

“10,000 B.C.” is a film that is clichéd and too serious for its own good. It lacks any sense of real fun and its slow pace outstays its welcome. The lead actor, complete with dreadlocks, looks like he just jumped out of a fashion catalogue and appears way too clean and manicured to be convincing as someone from the era.  You know something’s wrong when the wooly mammoths look more convincing than any of the actors on the screen. Also, the accents of the characters are a linguistic mess and don’t do the film any justice. I believe a good B.C. film can be made in the modern filmmaking era but a film such as this cannot scrape in on visuals alone, it needs intriguing characters, a solid story, believable performances and a sense of adventure to really soar. “10,000 B.C." has none of these things. How this film was given a green-light with such a flimsy script is anybody’s guess? It’s a disappointment for all concerned. 

I couldn’t help but think of two other films while watching “10,000 B.C.”, Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto” (2006) and the Raquel Welch classic “One Million Years B.C.” (1966). Both those films are superior to this one, “Apocalypto” is an absolute masterpiece in comparison while “One Million Years B.C.” features a visual feast of dinosaurs that were exceptional for their time. Even at its visual best, not one scene in “10,000 B.C.” can compare to the opening sequence of a bikini-clad Raquel Welch in “One Million Years B.C.”. Even the poster for the new film is not an inch on the eye-catching nature of the Raquel Welch film poster for that matter. I so much wanted “10,000 BC” to be a good film but in the end all we got was a good example on how to botch up a potentially great film. On a positive note the film is fairly family friendly and the action sequences are relatively bloodless, so kids might have some fun with it.  I was going to give the film 1 star but I changed my mind last minute and gave it an extra ½ star only because the wooly mammoths bowled me over with that special sequence. Finally “10,000 B.C.” is only worth a trip to the cinema if you are a young teen or a die-hard fan of the genre otherwise a DVD screening is probably sufficient.

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The Raquel Welch "B.C." Classic - Now Available on DVD:

One Million Years B.C. (1967) [DVD]
A prehistoric menagerie animated by Ray Harryhausen and Raquel Welch wearing "Mankind's first bikini" are the highlights in this remake of the caveman adventure epic. Will Raquel's shore-dwelling Shell People learn to live with their neighbors, the Rock Tribe, before they all become dinosaur fodder? With John Richardson, Martine Beswick. 91 min. Widescreen (Enhanced); Soundtracks: English Dolby Digital stereo, Spanish Dolby Digital mono; Subtitles: English, Spanish; theatrical trailers.

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