10,000 BC (2008)
Directed by Roland Emmerich
A prehistoric epic that follows a young mammoth hunter's journey through uncharted territory to secure the future of his tribe.
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3 films that influenced 10,000 BC
What critics say influenced 10,000 BC
Regardless of one's critical opinions of individual films, it's hard to deny the balls-out, ultra-visceral, stylistically audacious approaches of "Apocalypto" and "300" injected some fresh excitement into a long-dormant and generally derided genre.
An amalgamation of much better movies, riffing on offerings as diverse as Quest for Fire, Apocalypto, The Ten Commandments, and any number of creaky ancient myths, Emmerich has finally hit the Monterey Jack-pot.
Emmerich's version of the Pleistocene epoch has just about everything - woolly mammoths, a sabre-toothed tiger, feathered dinosaurs with jaws like white pointers and a tribe of extras who look as if they have wandered across from Mel Gibson's Apocalypto.
If those evil folk sound suspiciously like refugees from Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto," that's not the only movie "10,000 BC" plunders.
Emmerich borrows from BRAVEHEART and APOCALYPTO, so such conjecture has a basis in what turns up on screen.
D'Leh's heroic journey begins after his love, Evolet (Camilla Belle), is kidnapped along with numerous other tribespeople by the slave raiders of a far-off civilization, ruled -- as in "300" and the quite similar "Apocalypto" -- by sophisticates whose superior learning, technology and architectural ingenuity are equated with cruelty, idolatry and sexual perversity (the steps of their Cyclopean pyramids are rife with Mandarin-nailed eunuchs).
Emmerich borrows from BRAVEHEART and APOCALYPTO, so such conjecture has a basis in what turns up on screen.
Strait easily is the worst actor ever tasked to give the “Braveheart” morale speech — by now so easy a caveman could do it.
It’s like Apocalypto meets Stargate (the movie, not the TV show) with bits of Jurassic Park and Braveheart thrown in, cuz those were great movies, right?
Stealing cues from “Apocalypto,” “Braveheart,” and his own “Stargate” (not to mention numerous other films), Emmerich has assembled a funky bouillabaisse of derivative material glued together by the CG sequences, which imagine a land populated with grazing mammoths, fierce saber-tooth tigers, and massive ostrich-like creatures that allow Emmerich a chance to rip-off the Velociraptor attack from “Jurassic Park.”
Unfortunately, visual effects and far-out ideas aren’t enough to overcome a film overflowing with banal dialogue spoken in an unconvincing accent (supposedly a mix of Standard English and Arabic), a bland love story that borrows from "Apocalypto" and "Last of the Mohicans," a dully self-doubting hero unwilling to “heed the call” and become a leader in the "Braveheart" mold, not one, but two plot-propelling prophecies short on logic, a thumbs-down worthy supernatural turn, and one too many unanswered questions about the pyramid builders and where they came from.
After all, the cheddar-fied flavor of wildly uneven spectacles like Stargate, Independence Day, Godzilla, and The Day After Tomorrow mandate such an evaluation.
Certainly there’s not enough chemistry to justify mammoth-boy’s epic quest to steal his beloved back from a marauding tribe based in the “mountains of the Gods,” which turns out to look a lot like the pseudo-Egyptian sets from Stargate.
It’s like Apocalypto meets Stargate (the movie, not the TV show) with bits of Jurassic Park and Braveheart thrown in, cuz those were great movies, right?
His latest effort is from the dopier end of his special-effects-oriented output, somewhere between "Stargate" and "Poseidon."
The director is doing no good at all to his legacy with the new 10,000 BC , which just might be his best film in a decade and a half (I have strong guilty-pleasure affection for the 14-year-old Stargate ), granting a nice, relative sense of the word "best".
Once upon a time Roland Emmerich made greasy popcorn entertainment that was buoyant and exciting (“Stargate,” “Independence Day”).