March 07, 2008
Bad movie alert
I love a good review of a bad movie.
10,000 B.C. (Warner Bros.), Roland Emmerich's new prehistoric adventure, disappoints not because it's a bad caveman movie, but because it isn't one at all. Rather than taking the trouble to imagine what early civilization might have been like—its culture, its language, its warfare, its family life—the movie simply transposes a banal Hollywood epic into Paleolithic times. Or maybe Mesolithic.
Emmerich, who's already done alien invasion (Independence Day) and environmental armageddon (The Day After Tomorrow), excels at staging grand-scale chaos, but he's no stickler for detail. So what if the construction of the pyramids didn't really overlap with the existence of the woolly mammoth? Can you honestly say you don't want to see a herd of crazed mammoths stampeding down the ramps of a pyramid in progress?
[...]
I don't begrudge this plot its stupidity or lack of verisimilitude; some of my best friends are stupid and far-fetched. What makes the movie a drag is the pedestrian joylessness with which it plods through its hypercompressed evolutionary timeline.
The invention of agriculture? Oh, here's a bag of seeds to take home from your journey.
The first encounter with foreign languages? Hey, luckily there's a guy who can translate them all for you.
One of the movie's biggest disappointments is its failure to have fun with language. All the Yagahls communicate in grammatically perfect, vaguely accented English. Even their mellifluous names (D'Leh? Evolet?) could easily appear on the roster of a hippie preschool.
Anthony Burgess created an entire proto-language for Quest for Fire; the best Emmerich and his co-writer, Harald Kloser, can do is to envision a time before the invention of contractions. ("Do not eat me when I set you free.")
It's hard to believe that 27 years have passed since the release of the best caveman movie ever:
Now that's filmmaking!
Posted by Mike Lief at March 7, 2008 10:21 AM
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