Three stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, and perhaps too harshly, for prehistoric action violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.7.08
Buy DVD: 10,000 B.C.
• Buy Blu-Ray: 10,000 B.C. [Blu-ray]
I don't care if the screenwriters are trying to be historically accurate; this movie needs dinosaurs.
Desperately.
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| After falling into a pit trap, D'Leh (Steven Strait) discovers that he's sharing it with a greatly annoyed saber-toothed tiger. But the tiger is entangled as well, and — against his better judgment — our young hero decides to free the beast and hope that it won't devour him. |
Or it needs something. I'd settle for Raquel Welch or Carole Landis.
That's the primary issue: Despite all the golly-gee-wow technology that turns its third act into a breathtaking visual spectacle, the story at the heart of 10,000 B.C. is so retro that it creaks as badly as its juvenile "Me Tarzan, you Jane" dialogue. The special effects notwithstanding, I'd have to say that both 1940's One Million B.C. (with Landis) and 1966's One Million Years B.C.
(Welch) were far more entertaining. Like George Lucas before him, director Roland Emmerich has based his career on re-invigorating Hollywood's golden age of action-adventure serials. Emmerich's early efforts were impressive: Stargate
made enough of a splash with genre geeks that it spawned not just one but two TV shows, one of which continues even now; Independence Day
was a hell-for-leather riff on War of the Worlds that proved far more fun than Steven Spielberg's way-too-serious remake of the H.G. Wells classic. Heck, I even enjoyed Emmerich's update of Godzilla
, a film that probably would have been far more successful if Sony hadn't tried to persuade us that it was the cinematic equivalent of the Second Coming. But Emmerich's spectacle began to outstrip his story sense with The Day After Tomorrow
, which played like one of the hokey disaster flicks so popular in the 1970s and '80s. And while 10,000 B.C. isn't quite a disaster, it's also nothing to write home about. Calling this prehistoric ramble "dull" probably overstates the case, but the film takes a long, long time to reach its conclusion.
The primary faults lie both with the script and the starring players. The former — credited to Emmerich and Harald Kloser — is insufferably primitive and simplistic; the latter scarcely register on the screen. Thank goodness for New Zealand actor Cliff Curtis, who makes a strong impression as the seasoned warrior who guides our callow protagonist; absent his involvement, we probably wouldn't care about any of these characters.
