10,000 BC by Finn mac Cumhal

OTHER SCIENCE FICTION SERIES

10,000 BC

POSTED BY: FINN MAC CUMHAL
UPDATED: Sunday, March 16, 2008 16:55
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Sunday, March 16, 2008 4:55 PM

10,000 BC

Well if you follow my posts and since I’m so charming and entertaining, I know everyone does, you’ll know that I recently posted my picks for the best three upcoming films.
http://www.fireflyfans.net/thread.asp?b=8&t=31907

Now I’m here to discuss the first of these films to come out: 10,000BC.

Wow! How does such a great idea for an epic story with such huge visual effects and hot blue-eyed girls go so bad? This movie was long and kind of stupid and really cheesy.

So the movie begins in what I presume is the Caucus mountains, where a tribe of Cro-Magnon Big Game hunters are surviving off their Mammoth hunts. They adopt a little girl with stunning blue eyes - the first blue-eyed human - named Evolet, who will later be played by the very hot Camilla Belle. Later horseman (“four legged demons”) from what I presume to be the region of Egypt invade and take prisoners for slave labor, and of course Evolet is among them prompting her knight in leather loincloth to go after her. Which he does, traveling across the expanse of late Pleistocene Caucuses all the way down to down to Bronze Age Africa, an admirable feat for any epic adventurer, and in the process amasses an army of Mandinko warriors who take on an early Egypt, an Egypt armed with iron weapons, cavalry, domestication of Mammoths and wooden ships, literally millennia before any such things existed.

Let’s talk about historical accuracy for a moment. The events in this movie takes place about 12000 years ago. While reed boats have been in use for tens of thousands of years, wooden plank boats probably are not 12000 years old. The horse wasn’t domesticated as an instrument of war, until at least 8000 years ago, and when it was domesticated it was in Europe, not Egypt. The earliest Egyptian pyramids are about 5000 years old and Iron wasn’t even smelted before about 4000 years ago. So where does all this stuff come from in the movie? The movie takes its influence from the marginal theories that the Egyptian civilization, as identified by the Pyramids and the Sphinx, is much older (perhaps 15,000 years old), but such an argument requires that the geography be correctly presented - meaning that 15000 years ago, Egypt was no a desert, but lush grassland.

You might expect that a movie that takes this many liberties with the facts wouldn’t take itself so seriously, but in fact it does very much so, even as it presents bland one-dimensional “bad-guys“ who are as dumb as they are evil. And the point of the story is for a bunch of boyscoutish Cro-Magnons and Mandinko warriors to go to war with civilization. The story expects you to buy this crap, but it’s hard to swallow. How could a bunch of people smart enough to have invented civilization 7000 years ahead of anyone else and agricultural at least 2000 years ahead of anyone else be a bunch of blundering idiots?

On the plus side, there was a lot of beautiful scenery and cool woolly mammoths, even if for some absurd reason some of them were domesticated. The only really cool fight scene was when the otherwise yodo-ish Tictic pulled the bone dress off the tribes ceremonial spear and started going Bruce Lee on some Egyptian type scouts - reminiscent of fight scenes in Last of the Mohicans. That was pretty cool. The obligatory great battle scene at the end of the movie was perhaps the most interesting and stunning part of the whole film - the only thing really that didn’t make this film a total loss. Camilla Belle looked the part - not many woman could pull off an enticing beauty through tear streaked dirt and filth-muck, but she did a good job, without ever showing us much skin.

What could have made this movie better? Get rid of all the supernatural mumbo-jumbo. It really killed any chance of an intelligent movie when the old tribal witch started using magic. Make the bad guys, not stupid. Bad guys or no, these guys invented civilization, agriculture, shipbuilding, architecture etc, whether we’re supposed to sympathize with them or not, they are obviously not dumb. When it comes right down to it, it was at times fun to watch with breathtaking images, but the movie insulted my intelligence because it failed to provide a mature context for the story it was trying to tell.

I see this in a lot of PG-13 movies. Take Fantastic IV for instance, which didn’t work as well as it could have because it wasn’t PG. The producers were trying to make it a little edgy, but it was not an edgy story. 10,000BC however should have been R. It should have punctuated the hardships and the joys and the ambiguities of the Neolithic life and contrasted the hunter-gather societies with that of civilization and brought it to life for adults in all its Biblical allusions, instead they defanged the violence and nullified the deeper concepts of the story and added a kid for sidekick quirkiness. There were more realistic fight scenes in Conan the Barbarian - with all the stabbing and trampling not a single drop of blood was spilled. The main protagonist traveled the world and amassed an army to save his true love, whom it is never made clear he knows what to do with. She is supposed to be the mother of all Caucasians - the Biblical “Eve” (Evolet), but she can’t do it by binary fission like an amoeba - someone’s going to have to knock her up. The point is that the movie didn't have the maturity to tell the story it was trying to tell.

I won’t say the movie is so horrible that you just shouldn’t go see it. If you have a weekend and $6 try it out. You’ll probably like the cool visuals a lot more on the big screen then you will on DVD, and that may be its only attractions. But it’s not nearly the movie I was hoping for.

Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.

Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.

-- Cicero

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