Movie Review - '10,000 B.C.'

10,000 B.C.

Starring Steven Strait, Camilla Belle and Cliff Curtis
Directed by Roland Emmerich
Rated PG-13

I wish I had time to tell you how stupid 10,000 B.C. is and in how many ways it fails any litmus test for entertainment. Oh, I'll give you the highlights, but it's a movie that has to be seen to be believed. However, I don't feel anyone should ever have to sit through it.

It is easy to focus on how stupid this movie is, because the story is so simplistic, it never veers from one of the most cliched storytelling models in the world: Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl again. And because there's no story to concentrate on, you can really pick this mess apart.

Now, anyone can say, "Why do these people speak English." That's easy: We have to understand them. You could have them speak some made-up grunt language, but English is fine for these purposes. What is inexcusable is a basic misunderstanding about history and civilizations that makes 10,000 B.C. the biggest budget laughingstock since Battlefield Earth.

The movie jumps the gun on metallurgy by roughly 4,000 years, mathematics by nearly 7,000 years, and cartography and astronomy by several thousand years each. Why is all of this an issue? Well, when you have characters saying things like "Men need to build a circle around themselves" some 7 millennia before circles have a name, and when villains consult the stars through primitive telescopes around the time ancient man was more concerned with divining a way to farm, it's worth questioning. Why have those things in your movie? Just keep it simple, like Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, and you'll be fine.

But 10,000 B.C. doesn't know what it wants to be or how it wants to bend its rudimentary concept, which is why unincorporated tribes descend from a snow-capped peak one day and into a rain forest the next, which prepares them for their next day's journey across a barren desert where they meet what we identify as African, aboriginal and Central American tribes. And there are giant imposters of the Egyptian pyramids, also anachronistically embedded in this script, because those weren't built for thousands of years, primarily because nobody knew what a pyramid was.

Am I nitpicking? Not at all. This movie could've been more believable as 3,000 BC or 1,500 BC, but director Roland Emmerich wants to bridge the prehistoric world with the traditional villains we associate with ancient civilizations. Well, sorry, but tribesmen from 12,000 years ago weren't fighting Sumerians adorned in purple sashes and solid gold fingernails. That's just stupid. It's as likely as watching The Passion of the Christ and having Jesus pop into a Starbucks.

And again, if the story were the least bit compelling - I mean if there was an iota of substance to it - I wouldn't have had the time to catalog most of this movie's embarrassing flaws.