10,000 B.C.

Roland Emmerich

BY Scott A. GrayPublished Mar 7, 2008

Every once in a while a film comes along that is so ridiculous and terribly constructed that it’s almost a sick delight to watch the steadily widening ripples of ineptitude swallow every potential element of coolness.

This is the Roland Emmerich who made Stargate and Independence Day, so he should at least be competent enough to fashion a flashy, brainless schlock-buster. It doesn’t even need to make much practical sense. So what kind of fumes was the director exposed to while conceiving and executing the atrocious mess of a movie that is 10,000 B.C.? Emmerich is either an idiot or he’s convinced his audience is a pack of simpletons. Unless he’s actually intentional crafted a massively budgeted in-joke for fans of horribly thoughtless filmmaking.

Stop me if you’re heard this one before: a young hunter embarks on a prophesised quest to save his kidnapped people (including his beloved) and lead his tribe into a new age. If you’ve seen Apocalypto, you’ve already seen a far better version of this movie, just minus the badass CGI mammoths, giant killer ostriches and that sabre-toothed tiger. But hey, that’s what this movie’s all really about: CGI mammoths. And they deliver. They are so beautifully rendered that they look and feel more realistic than any other aspect of the film. If only Emmerich had put a fraction of the effort into making the rest of the movie that the graphic team put into creating those furry beasts.

Maybe it’s an attempt at multiculturalism, or Emmerich is a massive supporter of the concept of Pangaea, but the geography of 10,000 B.C. is most troubling. How does one tribe include at least six different ethnic groups, with accents to match, and how are they able to walk straight down a snowy mountain, right into a tropical jungle, out onto a savannah and straight into a sandy desert without crossing a single body of water?

Possibly the most thoughtless and banal story ever told, Roland Emmerich’s 10,000 B.C. just might be awful enough to steal Hollywood’s dynamite hack crown from Michael Bay.
(Warner)

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