Cast: Steven Strait, Camille Belle

Director: Roland Emmerich

Screenplay: Roland Emmerich

Genre: Action/Adventure

Running time: 1 hr 49 mins


CRITIQUE:


With the former efforts of GODZILLA, the silly monstrous monster of a film, INDEPENDENCE DAY, the middle-brow, but famous nevertheless, and THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW, a superior stab on the global climate effect, ambition seemed to be only natural for Roland Emmerich to undertake anything that concerns either big-scale or blockbustery. So naturally enough, his next venture is the prehistoric epic of skin-clad men battling mammoths, sabretooth tigers, and giant chickens may it be in the jungles, deserts or wintry landscapes. In fact, Emmerich seem to consider it so natural for him that he must have spent his posh time having tea and teacakes, instead of carefully researching and pinning down every minutiae of historical fact. The result is a grandiloquently ambitious film, with an inkling of accuracy as though this was hurriedly researched with a deadline through Wikipedia. We’ve had dumb films already, but crafting a supposedly historical epic, historical, geographical and anthropological aspects are ignored for the sake of Hollywood exploitation – but this is one impossibly dumb approach to its material.


Its premise is promising: it takes us back to when humans wear no Pradas nor Lacroixs, just loincloths in the post-Ice Age world. Mammoths started to migrate across the continents, and civilisations were in the brink of evolution. One tribe remains distant in the cold mountains, as the narrator Omar Charif tells us with his urgent, whispery voice, but when the tribal people started speaking in English language with a Jamaican accent – it is one gargantuan smack-head moment. Realism aside, should these people who come from the time just after dinosaurs roamed the Earth, they would have learnt less than just roars, moans and just basically verbal sounds. But English? And with almost perfect grammar? We never knew the innovators of the English language come from the Stone Age.


What is more, when the character of D’Leh (Steven Strait) embarks on an odyssey to save his loved one, Evolet (Camille Belle), after the ransacking of their tribe, he crosses first wintry mountains, then a jungle, then finally a desert – geographic settings which doesn’t make sense. Whilst geographers laugh their heads off, historians, archaeologists, biologists and paleontologists will be scratching theirs. Mammoths may be acceptable, but giant chicks on a jungle? Emmerich seemed to have taken one step further to JURASSIC PARK. The film’s finale, a big, bombastic, yet spectacular imagery of the building of pyramids and the uprising of slaves, is a visual feast, but one couldn’t quite silence the absurdity of Emmerich’s theory of mammoths being involved in the building of the Pyramids. The period doesn’t seem to fit in the historical timeline. Additionally, the main actors in the film are absolutely miscast, Strait and Belle, as they can be considered too good-looking for their roles, which are fundamentally humans who existed alongside mammoths. Even the humans in Mel Gibson’s incredibly superior APOCALYPTO never looked more or less than savages. Aside from that, 10,000 B.C. supposed to exist in a highly barbaric community, and rarely do blood gushes out from stabs and slashes. There’s nary a form of gore in it.


Even the story is a shameless excuse for an epic adventure. Man travels, gathers followers, deemed as the chosen one, then saves his people and his woman. If it’s not clichéd, then the word does not exist in the vocabulary. This might entertain others, but dumb and dull it could ever be.


VERDICT:

Perhaps one of the greatest bastardisations of historical accuracy in the existence of cinema, that’s the real prize for Emmerich. Oh, and it’s preposterously made, add in some dodgy research, and laughable dialogues. This visually stunning vehicle could serve as an awful relic for those without any trace of intelligence.



RATING: D