Prehistoric
posted on Thursday, March 06, 2008 in Movie Reviews
What do you get when you blend together every “epic movie” within the last five years? You’ll probably get something close to 10,000 BC, one of the most utterly derivative films in recent memory. Stealing plot elements and even shots wholesale from the likes of 300 and Pirates of the Caribbean, this film has the trappings, but none of the soul. D’Leh is a young mammoth hunter from a prehistoric hunter-gatherer tribe. His village is attacked by an enemy from a far more advanced civilization, and Evolet, the love of his life is taken prisoner. D’Leh must rise to the occasion and travel across distant lands, facing all sorts of prehistoric dangers to rescue Evolet. Along the way, he finds a greater destiny awaiting him, and that he must lead an army to defeat a seemingly unbeatable foe.
Story-wise, 10,000 B.C. doesn’t do anything we haven’t seen anything before. It’s all the same tropes of greater destinies and long, epic journeys across treacherous terrain. The hero, D’Leh, is practically a prehistoric version of Will Turner from Pirates of the Caribbean. He’s a young man whose father disappeared while he was young and ends up going an epic quest because of a girl. It’s glaringly obvious at times how little creativity this film actually has. It just takes whatever worked from other movies and pasted them into a pastiche of clichés and archetypes. By the second act, one begins to lose interest in what’s going on, and it drags the film down. And by the third act, whatever the film had at the start is completely gone, and even the big action scenes can’t reenergize it.
Entire sequences seem terribly familiar. There are shots here that seem to have been lifted completely off the movie 300. Now, Roland Emmerich isn’t exactly known for being an auteur, but he’s always his own visual flair. Here, he seems to be content with cribbing the look of other successful films. The only place where this film succeeds is in bringing some of the prehistoric creatures to life. The mammoths are pretty impressive, as are the glimpses of other animals that we get in the film.
Casting unknowns was a pretty good move, but these unknowns aren’t very good. Steven Strait has a pretty sympathetic face, which helps, but he doesn’t really have the presence to get people behind him. Perhaps it’s unfair, because he’s saddled with the strange accented English that’s supposed to pass for prehistoric speak, but that’s the hand he was dealt, and he wasn’t able to run with it. Camilla Belle spends the entire film with only two expressions: worry and defiance. Obviously, that isn’t enough. Omar Sharif’s narration is pretty good, but it’s easy to get tired of it as well.
10,000 B.C. is easy enough to watch. It’s still a Hollywood blockbuster, with big, heavy moments and some fun action. But really, it’s not the kind of film that’ll stick to you. It’s not something that’ll get talked about or remembered a couple of weeks from now. It just has nothing new to show us, or any better ways to say something. It just doesn’t deserve your time.
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