10,000 Years ago and young hunter D'Leh (Steven Strait) embarks on a quest to save the girl he loves (Camilla Belle), while securing the future of his tribe into the bargain.
Before you can say 'why are all these cave men speaking English?', plucky D'Leh has encountered a sabre toothed tiger, woolly mammoths and colossal birds that would eat you as look at you.
From Roland Emmerich, director of The Day After Tomorrow and Independence Day, comes this latest epic adventure with a whole lot of teeth, but practically no-one you would recognise from the cast.
They say:
Rolling Stone: "Call it Apocalypto for pussies."
Variety: "Conventional where it should be bold and mild where it should be wild."
Empire: "Embarrassingly enjoyable, guilty fun."
We say:
Time: evening. Location: your local multiplex.
As you sit there watching 10,000 BC, perhaps wondering where that tiny piece of gherkin on your jumper has come from, or why Council Tax has gone up so much this year, you may realise you're not having a very good time. Is this movie really as bad as all that? Yes. Worse.
Where to start? The story, pace, clichés, dreadful effects, abhorrent acting, the sets, hokey religion, quasi philosophising, the annoying kids, the annoying adults, the music, the running time, the costumes, the inexplicable Eastern European accents, the inane subtitles (because the other tribe DON’T speak English), the cartoony 'spear tooth' tiger that would look more at home in Hamleys than the prehistoric badlands... the list goes on and on. This abomination of a movie was clearly made by someone who has absolutely no clue what he is doing.
10,000 BC had been bounced around in pre-production for several years. Director Roland Emmerich's difficulty in getting the project off the ground was largely due to his insistence on casting no familiar faces as apparently this would have taken away from the 'realism' of the plot.
This was almost sound reasoning by Emmerich, shifting emphasis onto the period rather than the actors, though did put a mountain of pressure on his FX team to deliver the scary monster goods - and they utterly failed.
The CGI beasts are, for the most part, so poorly rendered that TV shambles Primeval actually appears proficient in comparison. The animals have no sense of weight - the tiger in particular seems to float through the air like a paper aeroplane, untroubled by its half ton bulk or gravity (or whatever they called it before Galileo started tossing around his balls).
If we told you the best scene on offer here involved 'the first hero' D'Leh (a fresh faced Strait, trying his damndest to keep a straight face) suffering indigestion from eating a chilli pepper, you may not believe us.
If we told you D'Leh also talks the spear tooth tiger out of ripping him to shreds by wisecracking "Do not eat me when I set you free", then you would probably have your doubts.
Honestly though, these are two equally absurd highlights from the cacophony of crud that is 10,000 BC. We will even tell you a spoiler (the girl dies and comes back to life) if it will stop you from wasting your time and money on seeing this - we care that much.
Gun to our head, we might say that the fur on the mammoths looked impressively realistic. But being as fifteen years has now passed since Jurassic Park birthed the computer animated revolution, everything onscreen should appear as lifelike as that piece of gherkin you might still be wondering about on your jumper.
If you absolutely must endure 10,000 BC (say, because your dad is the director), do as we did and take along a pencil - jabbing the nib in your eye might be the only way to regain a sense of feeling after the dumbest, naffest cinematic violation of your life.
CAST
Steven Strait
Camilla Belle
Cliff Curtis
Joel Virgel
Omar Sharif
DIRECTOR
Roland Emmerich
TIME
109 mins
POSTED...
Tue 18 Mar at 8:19pm
