10,000 B.C. A Avrage One

It was a time when man and beast were untamed and the mighty mammoth roamed the earth. A time when ideas and beliefs were born that forever shaped mankind. 10,000 B.C. follows a young hunter (Steven Strait) on his quest to lead an army across a vast desert, battling saber tooth tigers and prehistoric predators as he unearths a lost civilization and attempts to rescue the woman he loves (Camilla Belle) from an evil warlord determined to possess her.
Aside from its plot holes, storytelling deficiencies and often terrible special effects, there were really only three things I could think about while watching 10,000 B.C.: colored contacts aren't distinctive, they're distracting; Roland Emmerich is essentially Michael Bay with more ambition; and in the wake of 300, all historical epics may in fact need that cartoonish, desaturated patina in order to be taken seriously. Why one would be paying attention to any of these things during an opus as sweeping and melodramatic as this film should be is a testament as to how effective the end result is. But as the default cartoon/parody version of Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, 10,000 B.C. is a big movie whose charms are sadly small and superficial at best.

In the film, Steven Strait (The Covenant) stars as D'Leh, a young mammoth hunter who finds his mettle tested when slave traders invade his village and kidnap his beloved companion Evolet (Camilla Belle). Following the traders' trail through dangerous lands with the help of village elder Tic'Tic (Cliff Curtis), D'Leh begins to come of age, both as a hunter and a man. But when he arrives at an enormous construction site where Evolet is sentenced to be sacrificed to the gods, he quickly realizes that he must learn what it takes to be a leader.

The film's very first scenes are the ones featuring the worst special effects -- seldom have I felt less convinced that actors were in a given location than when projected here against detached wintry backdrops, or running alongside massive, computer-generated woolly mammoths. But worse than this is the fact that the movie is shot virtually without any style, as if set design and CGI would compensate for Emmerich's lack of directorial panache. I wouldn't have argued this at the time of its release, but 300 has really changed the defining look of these historical epics, perhaps for some years to come. Watching perfunctorily-shot exchanges between two extras from those cavemen TV commercials, the film feels more like a Saturday Night Live skit than any kind of authentic epic.

That said, Emmerich is actually a competent director, in the sense that -- visually speaking -- everything in his film makes sense. It's in this modest regard that I count him as superior to the aforementioned Bay, who sometimes ignores great stretches of necessary visual coherence in order to exercise his frenetic "creativity." Additionally, Emmerich's vision is larger and more ambitious: Where Bay seems content to make movies bigger and louder, Emmerich wants to expand their scope and really create a universe. Mind you, neither are destined for directing awards any time soon, and in fact there are plenty of stunning gaffes in 10,000 B.C., but I can respect its ambition enough to ignore some of those shortcomings -- for a while, anyway.
Overall, 10,000 B.C. is one of the more inoffensive films I've seen this year, even if it isn't very good. Unlike garbage like Fool's Gold, Emmerich and his cast and crew seem to be interested in trying something, even if collectively they don't pull it off. So I don't recommend the film, and in fact disliked it a lot, but there's nothing aggressively bad or painful about it. There have already been and will be plenty of awful pictures in 2008, but the worst ones will haunt you long after you've left the theater. In which case, the best thing that can be said about 10,000 B.C. is that it won't spend the next 10,000 years, much less 10 minutes, in your mind once you've seen it -- especially if you can ignore those contact lenses.