10,000 B.C.
Did you see the movie Caveman, with Ringo Starr? Some of the buzz is making 10,000 B.C. (or 10KBC for the hipster crowd) out to be a worse movie than Barbara Bach’s furry bikini debut. Look, no one, I mean no one, expected this movie to be high art. Roland Emmerich directed it – he did Independence Day. That movie isn’t “good,” but in a very similar way, both movies are kind of great. Like, Kraft macaroni and cheese is great. You would never get it for your last meal, or in a restaurant for a first date, but it has its place. 10KBC sits firmly and confidently in its place. And I mean, come on, it’s so much better than Pathfinder!
The story is couched and presented as a real legend, and to its credit, the film maintains that reverent tone (as if adapting someone else’s vaguely sacred notions) throughout. I kept thinking, “this feels like a real story,” even when it was patently ridiculous. While this leads occasionally to unintended laughs, the upside of this is a difficult to identify but definite sense that the people involved actually believed in what they were doing. We have your typical pre-historic mammoth hunter tribe (so, Cro-Magnon, roughly) living in the snowy mountains of Cavemania. One of these pan-ethnic tribesmen (the one with the troubled past, natch), D’Leh (easy on the eyes Steven Strait), has a destiny which brings him to become a sort of proto-Moses, an ur-Zorro, a Homo savior, if you will.
In what is clearly a very long walk, but not an epically long one, he goes from what appears to be the Canadian Rockies (turns out it’s New Zealand, go figure) to a lush, Lost-like tropical rainforest, menaced by World of Warcraft Blood Elf mounts and epoch-appropriate megafauna. He takes a left turn at Johannesburg, South Africa, and ends up in the savannas and Sahara-like wastes of Namibia, ending at a Nile-like CGI river (clogged with poetically beautiful boats – full of slaves). While of course, in our era of iPhones and self-parking Lexus cars, we still have pockets of hunter-gatherer societies, twelve thousand years ago, we did not have a lot more going for us as a species than flint-knapping and ochre paintings.
So, when D’Leh, pursuing the single-source progenitor* of the OCA2 mutation that gives us blue eyes today – oh, I’m sorry, I mean his one true love, Evolet (Camilla Belle) – makes this journey, making awesomely diverse friends along the way, he stumbles across some technology that definitely is violating the prime directive, since it’s not meant to be in human hands until about 6,000 years later, give or take. For example: architecture, agriculture, the number zero, masonry, sailing ships, metallurgy, goldsmithing, textiles from wool to silk, with attendant rare dyes in profusion, astronomy (basic) and astronomy (advanced), navigation, sextants, cartography, currency, animal husbandry and domestication, levers, pulleys, blocks and tackle, trebuchets, and harnesses, and the practice of quartering. I honestly was waiting for someone to pull out a gun at some point. Now, if you can just rename the movie 2,000 B.C. so you can sit back and just appreciate the spectacle and adventure, you might not mind so much. If they had just had a little metalworking in the more advanced societies, maybe it would have flown. But we had just stood up fully erect like, two weeks before this story takes place. The technology was distracting.
That said, it was kind of a hoot all around. They make blatant, cheap use of the old “day for night” trick where you lay a dark blue filter on daytime footage so it looks dim and moonlit – it was all they could do 50 years ago, but we have lights that plug into batteries now, so there is no excuse. The action sequences are shot with verve and fun and lots of great, gut-rumbling bass. The costumes, actually, were terrific (anachronism aside) – all the different tribes and the differing technological skills of the wearers’ societies, and the clear statuses they portray – with the number of characters in later scenes, this is vital. A critic sitting near me snorted in derision at my “the costumes kicked ass,” but I won’t back down. They were really cool.
It’s a fun, silly summer movie that came out in the dumping ground of the spring, but it will be fun to watch with friends and popcorn, maybe as some kind of consumption game.
*Said progentitor is thought to have lived six to ten thousand years ago, so we can give the movie one more point in the “got it right” column, next to “man hunted mammoth.”
MPAA Rating PG-13
Release date 3/7/08
Time in minutes 109
Director Roland Emmerich
Studio Warner Brothers
