10,000 BC
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(This post was updated on )
 With the end of the Ice Age dooming the Yagahl mammoth hunters’ way of life, the mountain tribe await a prophesied warrior saviour. Uncertain youth D’Leh (Strait) steps up when slave raiders capture the young men and D’Leh’s beloved Evolet (Belle), embarking on a perilous journey across the world to save his people.
You have to hand it to him, Roland Emmerich thinks big. After the sci-fi extravaganzas Stargate and Independence Day, the historical epic The Patriot and the environmental disaster flick The Day After Tomorrow, he has set out to create his own mythology, no less. 10,000 BC embroiders the classic coming-of-age, boy-with-a-heroic-destiny legends and lore told around camp fires for millennia with straight-faced, pretentiously sober spirituality, made-up mysticism and reams of voiceover narration (from Omar Sharif). A fiercely good looking, inventively-clad cast interact among dizzying layers of CGI, visual and sound effects to make a preposterous prehistoric adventure quest that is undeniably spectacular. You can feel the earth and your teeth shake, rattle and roll when the mighty herds of massive woolly mamoths stampede through the dwarfed company of vulnerable but athletic spear carriers. What is more embarrassingly enjoyable, guilty fun is the brash daftness run rampant. You can laugh at, but still dote on, the invented culture, ritual and poetic utterances (a dying warrior serenely says “I am full of days.”) of the plucky Stone Agers, who are, of course, highly attuned to the spirit world, signs and portents, and the forces of earth and the heavens. The Yagahl tribe (a hunky, dreadlocked lot in hide breeches and clay face packs) revere a crone called Old Mother. She crouches in her hide and bone lean-to speaking to the spirits and going into telepathic trances, suffering shakes and nosebleeds linked to the faraway travails befalling D’Leh (sincere, sinewy Steven Strait) and his handful of companions on their arduous trek on the trail of horse-riding, ship-sailing slavers to a lost civilization of proto-Egyptian meanies. It all takes place in a sort of imaginary Africa, by way of the Alps. The Yagahl don’t think much of D’Leh, something of an angst-ridden misfit who has father issues since the disappearance of his own, the leader of the tribe, who seemingly abandoned his people long ago. That’s one mystery that will be solved far, far away and many moons later. When his true love is snatched, however, D’leh resolves to rescue her, accompanied by his sympathetic, sage mentor Tic’Tic (Cliff Curtis), a cheeky boy follower, Baku (British teen Nathanael Baring) and a hot-headed rival for Evelet. And somewhere along the way he grows into a heroic leader of men. They don’t have a lot to work with, but one is struck by the quality of our heroes’ rough-hewn footwear, which carries D’Leh and his fellowship from freezing mountain tops down into a Pleistocene jungle (where they are beset by 'Terror Birds', killer critters which look, unintentionally hilariously, much like gigantic, enraged ostrich chicks) and across the searing sands of a vast desert (and, eventually, back again.). They rack up more miles than Frodo, in a fraction of the time. En route D’Leh bonds with a sabre-toothed tiger (it’s a prophetic sign) like Androcles did with the Lion; invents celestial navigation after wandering lost in the desert like Moses; discovers Agriculture (which will come in very handy for future survival, given the background of climate change) and gathers to himself an impressive variety of beleaguered tribal peoples -- of many tongues, many skin tones and helpfully colour-coded costumery with excellent accessories -- as he goes, creating an army for a terrific climactic uprising at the end of the world. Needless to say, Emmerich and like-minded collaborator, co-writer, producer and co-composer Harald Kloser’s vision of things neolithic will have anthropologists, archaeologists and paleontologists rolling in the aisles. Documentary-drama realism this is not. But in its peregrinations from high-altitude camp fire to sophisticated pre-Pharaonic city (where harnessed mammoths helpfully toting the heavy loads offer a startling new hypothesis on how the pyramids were built) this opus happily and shamelessly plucks popular notions from every caveman and loincloth saga ever, from One Million Years B.C. to Apocalypto. There are also touches of Lord Of The Rings, The Thirteenth Warrior and all the spiffing silent screen role models of young men finding their courage and ingenuity; abducted heroines (Belle, although not, alas, given a fur bikini, is a good, comely one; and dastardly, decadent exotic fiends for villains, with terrifyingly long fake fingernails and a taste for human sacrifice. And all this without any nudity, profanity or visceral brutality! It’s really rather sweet. The mammoths aren’t all that is wild and woolly in this innocent, old-fashioned, amusingly self-important, entertainingly mad, rip-snorting throwback to vintage Saturday matinee fare, with all the swell set piece thrills state-of-the-art technology can throw at it. You always know where you are with Roland Emmerich, the director of Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow. It's a place called Stupid. And it's to there we voyage in 10,000 BC, his latest and most preposterously silly film to date. One so knuckle-headed and slow-witted that it makes Caveman (1981) with Ringo Starr, or indeed One Million Years BC (1966) with Raquel Welch, look like towering works of Western civilisation. It is also, whisper it quietly, actually quite good fun. Roland Emmerich's 10,000 BC The story, whose flouting of the most elementary scientific and historical facts would make even the most fervent Creationist giggle, starts off atop icy, windswept mountains where the people of the Yagahl tribe are used to making do on stewed mammoth for dinner. They're an unkempt lot, mud-caked and stringy of hair in the style of early-Nineties illegal ravers or anti-runway protestors at Heathrow. Chief among them is D'Leh (Steven Strait), a muscle-clad Colin Farrell-lookalike, who is aghast when his beloved Evolet (Camilla Belle), together with most encampment settlers, are enslaved by "four-legged demons", Middle-Eastern-looking horsemen searching for cheap labour to build the pyramids of Egypt. Soon he, his mentor Tic'Tic (Cliff Curtis) and a couple of other intrepid souls, set off on a journey of what they hope is rediscovery. On they march: across snow; fierce, vaguely Asian jungles; sun-baked African deserts. They run into murderous giant ostriches and a strangely posh sabre-toothed tiger. They are nearly speared by the members of a black tribe whose leader Nakudu (Joel Virgel) conveniently turns out to speak English and divines in D'Leh a true and indomitable personality to which he warms. This rescue odyssey, penned by Emmerich and Harald Kloser, is startlingly close in content and form to Mel Gibson's Mayan epic Apocalypto. Its historical setting and David v Goliath structure also echoes Zack Snyder's 300. But where both those films were grunting bloodbaths full of intense, visceral scenes in which throats were slit, eyeballs gouged, and human faces chewed off by panthers, 10,000 BC is actually rather tame fare. advertisementEven the film's spectacular opening, in which members of the Yagahl tribe get caught up in the very same net intended to trap mammoths, and consequently get dragged across bumpy ground for what seems like miles, ends with a body count of zero. Life, it seems, was pretty costly back in pre-Christian days. Or perhaps Emmerich didn't want to risk getting slapped with a rating that would stop younger children from seeing his movie. The actors do what they can with the script. Which is, in truth, not very much: the words are stiff, as if they've been translated from a foreign language, and totally bereft of poetry. And so they scamper across the CGI landscapes, often wearing skimpy clothing despite the cold climates and threat of insect bites, delivering gruff phrases in comically deep voices. All of them have perfect teeth, while Evolet, in spite of a near-malnutrition diet regime, manages to look as glowing and clear-skinned as a debutante. 10,000 BC burdens itself with a message woollier than any of the mammoths. Something about how the poor, enslaved people of the world - regardless of their colour or caste or linguistic tribe - have the potential to throw off the yoke of oppression and create a kinder, gentler universe. It's probably best not to pay much attention to the film's philosophical ruminations. Ueli Steiger's photography is no more than functional, while the soundtrack by Thomas Wander is mostly uninspired booming. What then is there to like in 10,000 BC? I was happy that it didn't try to out-do 300 or Apocalypto in the macho stakes. Or that every other scene didn't feature a garroting. That said, Emmerich manages to rev up the action and choreograph key set-pieces effectively: who could remain impervious to the sight of rampaging mammoths, of ostriches seemingly off their heads on speed trying to peck to death winsome little boys, and of long-nailed imperial-court sycophants squealing with fear at the sight of mass rebellion.  Take pleasure, too, at the mayhem caused by insurrectionary mammoths breaking free of their masters and running amok among the Egyptian pyramids. Indeed, mammoths may very well be the next penguins as far as Hollywood is concerned. And if that's not an exciting prospect, I'm not sure what is. Steven Strait ... D'Leh Camilla Belle ... Evolet Cliff Curtis ... Tic'Tic Joel Virgel ... Nakudu Affif Ben Badra ... Warlord Mo Zinal ... Ka'Ren Nathanael Baring ... Baku Mona Hammond ... Old Mother Marco Khan ... One-Eye Reece Ritchie ... Moha Joel Fry ... Lu'kibu Omar Sharif ... Narrator Kristian Beazley ... D'Leh's Father Junior Oliphant ... Tudu Louise Tu'u ... Baku's Mother Download Torrent 
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by gioboia
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