10,000 B.C. (2008)

[ARCHIVE: This was the first article I wrote in a pact with my once-and-future-roommate, in an effort to get ourselves writing again. She has yet to finish her part of the bargin.]

There’s a moment in every movie when you realize exactly what it is you’re watching. Usually, it happens early in the movie. While the opening credits roll, the director has set the tone and mood with shots or sounds that will tell you what kind of approach is being employed. Many times, people go in knowing already knowing what to expect. After all, why would the audience be in that theater if they weren’t looking for what was on display in the television commercials? But sometimes the movie takes longer, trying to build suspense or lull one into a false sense of security. Sometimes it works. But more often than not, you’re left with a crowd that feels confused or cheated. So it is with 10,000 B.C.

Director Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow) tackles the film with the same grandstanding of his previous blockbusters. The landscape takes center stage, highlighted by shot after shot of beautiful, diverse locations. The film attempts to instill a sense of awe in the wild land, untouched by civilization, thrusting it in our faces with the same reverence as a newly discovered specimen long thought extinct. And in this way the movie works, if somewhat clumsily. Frosty mountain ranges, humid rain forests, arid deserts; each setting is unkempt and unique from afar. Until, of course, the humans walk into frame. Suddenly, one is too aware of how artificial the snow lands or the pristine condition of the desert huts.

The actors are no help, their hair falling into unnaturally parted messes, their grime too fresh to be more than minutes old. There’s just too much beauty in the features of the main actors that one really can’t look past the hair weaves and the mid-west accents. Which is a shame because they really try their best with what they are given. Stephen Strait (The Covenant) plays D’Leh, a young mammoth hunter that sets out from a dying tribe after not to find help for his people, but to save Evolet (played by When A Stranger Call’s Camilla Belle), the blue-eyed tan-skinned beauty taken from him during a raid by “four-legged demons.” While not offensive on paper, the lack of direction leaves the principle actors to stumble their way unconvincingly through dialogue that feels unnaturally constructed for any time period. We learn as much in a nauseating scene where D’Leh professes his love for Evolet to be as constant as the North Star.

While I’d like to say that it’s all downhill from there, such a statement would be misleading. We are carried through the movie by Cliff Curtis, cast in the role of Tic Tic, the Obi-Wan to D’Leh’s Luke Skywalker. Equal parts stoic and empathetic, Curtis plays the elder hunter with steady hand. His paternal relationship with the young hero is nuanced and believable. Equally good is Joel Virgel, who plays ally chieftain Nakudu. Although a relatively inexperienced actor, Virgel brings an intensity to the part that underscores the tribesman’s drive to free his kidnapped son. While Strait tells us of D’Leh’s devotion, Virgel shows us with a furrow of Nakudu’s brow or in the way he grips his spear.

Unfortunately for us, the film takes these two bright spots and packages them with a bungling protagonist as they traipse from one disaster to another. The action sequences are too few and too brief, over before you can really understand what has transpired. The computer-generated animals (and when you make a prehistoric film, there are many) are not believable from any angle, a fact that is all the more clear when the film awkwardly attempts to have the actors interact with their digital costars. This might be forgivable (what digital action sequence is without flaw?) if the story could carry us from one inelegant dance to the next. It is there that the movie fails most completely and unforgivably.

The idea of a primitive human tribe traversing exotic locales and eventually brushing against a celebrated and highly regarded ancient civilization is nothing new. Most recently the formula was revisited in Mel Gibson’s primal film Apocalypto, and while the two share a lot of superficial similarities, the same cannot be said of quality. Gibson’s movie, at its core, is an escape film that used the adrenaline of doomed captivity to draw the audience along. In contrast, Emmerich tries to shoehorn lessons about race relations, slavery, ancient prophecy and environmental spiritualism so that nearly every line of dialogue drips with obvious, ham-fisted double-meaning (right down to the deus ex machina happy ending). Added on top is a thick layer of cheese borne from romantic exchanges that seem to be cribbed from teen dramas.

In the end 10,000 B.C. is a mess of a film that could only please the English-speaking cavemen that it portrays.

FINAL SCORE: 1.5 out of 4