…yet made of stars

With 2004’s The Day After Tomorrow, and now with 10,000 B.C., Roland Emmerich seems determined to become the director equivalent of Dino de Laurentiis—in other words, a creator of stupid, preposterous schlock. He would be well-advised to check out last year’s de Laurentiis-produced The Last Legion, which managed to be twice the fun (and all the historical inaccuracy) for two-thirds the budget. To be honest, I’m not sure why producers keep giving Emmerich so much money, but when they do, he always seems to throw it in the wrong directions. 10,000 B.C. is, of course, no exception.

10,000 B.C. has a plot that could have easily fit into a movie trailer, which explains why the trailer for it contains no plot details. Here it is, though: Steven Strait stars as D’leh, a young man in a tribe of cavemen that hunt mammoths (which are hilariously referred to as “mannuck” throughout the film). A mysterious, pyramid-building race shows up one day, captures a number of them—including D’leh’s true love, Evolet (Camilla Belle)—and carts them off to slavery. Cue the rescue mission. D’leh must claim his place as the Obligatory Foretold Chosen One and set all the slaves free.

Fun parts: big animals.

With 10,000 B.C., Emmerich is ripping off everything from Peter Jackson’s King Kong to Chris Wedge’s Ice Age to Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto to Don Bluth’s The Land Before Time to Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments to Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress to Don Chaffey’s One Million Years B.C. to Emmerich’s very own Stargate. Come to think of it, it might actually be easier to list the movies that this one hasn’t ripped off.

So, it’s derivative and dull. I’ve left out the most important part, though: eye candy. Glorious, glorious eye candy. This movie has so much of it, and it’s all so, so good. If you want to see a tribe of cavemen hunting an entire herd of mammoths, you need to see this movie. If you want to see an adrenaline-pumped chase through a rainforest with some weird giant chickens, you need to see this movie. If you want to see the rescue and subsequent heroics of a plucky saber-toothed cat, you need to see this movie. There were numerous times when all I could do was stare at the screen and say “Wow.” So much care has been put into generating the special effects that you just might be convinced you’re watching a real mammoth (sadly, the cat looks a little bit fake, but it’s still pretty cool).

It’s unfortunate that what should have been the film’s star players—the CG beasties—have been relegated to the place of mere supporting characters by the script. There’s a total of maybe half an hour’s worth of money shots here, and I may have just told you about all of them. For every fun scene, we get three dull ones about prehistoric politics, young love, and New Agey (Old Agey?) prophecies. The actors could be reciting lines that were cut from last week’s episode of General Hospital, for all we care—the plot simply isn’t interesting, and the dialogue tells us next-to-nothing about what’s going on, anyway.

Less fun parts: people.

Emmerich’s had a handful of successful films in his career—on a commercial level, at least—Independence Day and The Patriot, for instance. The more I think about these, though, the more I realize how little there was to them. It’s not as though the premises here were particularly original (Space aliens attack earth! Englishmen attack America!), and the same, of course, can be said for 10,000 B.C. The difference, though, is that those two seemed to understand that action flicks stand or fall on the strength of their characters. Both of these took time to develop the major players in the incidents, and gave the audience a chance to sympathize with them. This is one of the first rules of B-moviemaking, I think, and Emmerich’s recent output shows that he’s forgotten this. If you want proof, try naming one character from The Day After Tomorrow (and no, “the guy who looked like Dick Cheney” does not count). 10,000 B.C. has, at its heart, the same problem: the characters have only shadows of personalities, only hints of motivation. We’re pleased to see that D’leh rescues his girlfriend, to be sure, but do we really care? Come to think of it, was there ever any doubt? When every single one of your characters gets upstaged by a special effect, your movie has problems.

Common problems, to be sure. But problems nonetheless.