Life > March 20, 2008

By Paul Szurek | Contributing writer

It’s dumb but fun, so just turn off your brain when you enter the theater. In 10,000 B.C. writer/director Roland Emmerich (Stargate, Independence Day) takes us back to a time of darkness and danger – a time before the invention of the wheel or good acting.

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Actually, in all fairness, there are wheels in the movie.

Emmerich said that he deliberately tried to cast no-names in the film because stars would have undermined the unknown mystery of its time period and prehistoric setting.

It’s one thing to hire modern-day Neanderthals to play prehistoric humans in the movie, but I think it was a bridge too far for the script to be primitive and moronic as well.

The dialogue is so lame and miserable that this couldn’t even pass for a Chuck Norris movie, and weird accents and a corny narrator only exasperate the situation.

However, high-powered action really does carry this movie, despite the bad lines – proof that Hollywood really doesn’t need writers.

10,000 B.C. delivers the greatest mammoth hunt in cinematic history as well as a killer performance by a pack of tree-climbing, 20-foot jungle chickens.

Other highlights include an up-close conversation with a fierce saber tooth tiger and plenty of long-range spear throwing.

10,000 B.C. tells the glorious and trite story of one man, a coward named D’Leh (Stephen Strait), and his quest to become a epic hero – by the traditional manner of saving his people and getting the girl.

D’Leh’s people (the Yagahli) happen to be a tribe of dreadlock-dawning woolly mammoth hunters who are barely prettier than the Geico cavemen, but his girl is an absolute babe: the blue-eyed Evolet (Camilla Belle).

As the mammoths start to disappear, and the Yagahl way of life fades into oblivion, a reckless band of “four-legged demons” (evil guys on horseback) attacks the tribe and kidnaps Evolet and many other Yagahlis.

Fulfilling an ancient prophesy, D’Leh sets out to rescue Evolet and save his people from slavery, hopefully leading the tribe into a new time of prosperity.

On his journey towards personal transformation and cultural salvation, D’Leh is aided by the Yagahl’s spiritual medium, an ancient witch called Old Mother who suffers a series of periodic seizures and brain hemorrhages throughout the movie to convey her struggle with the spirits of the world in this shamanistic age.

As D’Leh travels from his hunting grounds in the snowy mountains in pursuit of Evolet’s captors, he passes through jungles, grasslands and desert, confronting goofy CGI monsters and meeting ridiculously-dressed natives. As it turns out, the nefarious evildoers who stole Evolet have been bugging a lot of other people too.

Harnessing the technological power of iron, shipbuilding and horseback riding, the bad guys have abducted both humans and woolly mammoths alike and enslaved them in the desert to construct a giant golden pyramid for their pseudo-divine king.

To realize his destiny and become the first hero of the human race, D’Leh unites a multicultural army of disgruntled tribesman to beat down the evil empire and break the yolk of slavery and the stranglehold of superstition that plagues this ancient world.

While 10,000 B.C. is saddled with a severe lack of complexity and sophistication, the movie is still very enjoyable, and it takes a stab at some eternal themes of humanity.

D’Leh’s journey towards the legendary highlights primeval man’s inter-tribal struggle as well as the dawn of a new world era.

The movie has as much to do with the transformations of hunter-gatherer societies into agrarian civilizations as it does the individual fight of one hero.

When D’Leh returns to the great snowy mountains after his victory in the south, he bears not only the saved Yagahl slaves but also the seeds of the Neolithic Revolution – the salvation of his people going forward.

Who knows? 10,000 B.C. may one day find its way into your Anthropology class.