10,000 BC
POSTED BY: Finn mac Cumhal
UPDATED: Monday, March 17, 2008 02:55
VIEWED: 1026
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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
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