Bartholomew & Phool2056 Visit 10,000 B.C.!!

Merrick here...
For such an OBVIOUSLY Geeky movie...from a high-profile Geek director (love him or hate him)...and for a film that's been as heavily promoted as this one...we've received precious few reviews of 10,000 B.C., which opens FRIDAY. And maybe this is why we haven't heard too much. Here's a less-than-enthusiastic look at the movie from Bartholomew Richards. And, BELOW that, you'll find a slightly more accepting perspective...

Well, I saw 10,000 B.C. today at a free preview screening, and I have to say, it's pretty awful. I don't think Roland Emmerich is a genius or anything, but I'll admit that I enjoyed The Day After Tomorrow and Independence Day as much as the next guy. This flick should have been entertaining as hell; I mean, come on, woolly mammoths, sabre-tooth tigers, giant ostrich-monsters. How could these things not be entertaining? Well, I guess it was entertaining, but not in the way it was meant to be. After the box office success of The Day After Tomorrow, I'm kind of surprised that Emmerich would be relegated to a second-tier blockbuster such as this one, but hey, that's the way things are. The film is a mess, the marketing resembles 300, the plot resembles Apocalypto, the dialogue resembles Batman & Robin and the acting resembles a typical Dead Teenager movie. The film begins in the tundra with a small (yet somehow multi-ethnic) tribe of mammoth hunters that talk a lot of shit about who is going to kill the mighty mammoth, or something like that. While a lot of money went into the special effects of the film, I don't think much went into costume and make up. The actors have random face paintings in this sequence and all members of this particular tribe have dreadlocks. I mean, I know they didn't have showers back then, but come on. Anyways, after they kill a mammoth, a bunch of ugly dark-skinned guys with eye-liner come to take a bunch of the tribe members as hostage. One hostage is the beautiful Camilla Belle, who looks pretty damn hot considering the dreads, the dirt on her face, and those really weird eyebrows of hers. This lends to the plot, however, because D'Leh (Steven Strait) is in lurv with Miss Belle (named Evolet in the movie). So he sets off to free his tribesmen and his blue-eyed girlfriend from the evil grasps of the guys with dark skin and eye-liner (racism alert). If this plot sounds derivative, that's because it is. It's essentially Apocalypto, if the hero of that movie was running towards civilization instead of away from it. D'Leh even has the responsibility of fulfilling a prophecy or two along the way, and he gets to bring his friends, including Tic'Tic (Cliff Curtis, and no, I'm not making these names up) Along the way, in a matter of days, our heroes travel from the tundra, though snowy mountains, the jungle, the savannah, to the desert, to a civilization that resembles Egypt, but isn't Egypt. There's a big monument of a cat that looks like the sphinx, but isn't a sphinx and doesn't have a human head. In the desert, D'Leh befriends a few tribes of quasi-Africans to overtake the "Mountain of the Gods", which is a pyramid being built on the backs of the prisoners and some more woolly mammoths, which can, surprisingly, survive in the desert. I mean, I was expecting to suspend my disbelief a little bit, but the leaps of logic presented in this movie are massive. The action isn't as entertaining as it should be, although the CGI is impressive, it's still obvious in many scenes that the actors are working against a green-screen. The editing doesn't build suspense as it should and there's almost no gore because of the PG-13 rating. When Gibson gave us human sacrifice, he gave us a guy ripping hearts out of people before beheading them and throwing them down the stairs of a pyramid. The best Emmerich can do for human sacrifice is push a man off a ledge. 10,000 B.C. doesn't have a fraction of the energy of Apocalypto, or even 300, which I didn't like much either. I can't recommend this movie, even to those that are just looking for a fun blockbuster. It's not worth your money, it's even worse than Jumper. If you need to see an action movie, I hear next week's Doomsday is supposed to be good, if not, you could always see Rambo again.

Yeouch. Okay...here's Phool2056

I just got out of a student screening of the somewhat keenly awaited 10000 BC. The verdict: Not great. I feel bad writing as negatively about it as I'm probably about to, because watching it wasn't a miserable experience by any means. Its action scenes are fun enough to keep it out of the boring total waste of time category, but they're pretty heavily borrowed from other things, mostly Apocalypto, Jackson's King Kong, and eensy bits of the Jurassic Park franchise. I mean, yeah, not dinosaurs, but a big mouth with teeth is pretty much a big mouth with teeth. That's the thing that disappointed me the most. I mean, obviously it's not Citizen Kane, so I wasn't too surprised by the occasionally clunky dialogue and cheaply sentimental music, but the creatures didn't do it for me. The idea of getting to see monsters from a different, mostly unexplored era was the biggest appeal here, and they just didn't deliver. I'm hardly an expert in special effects, but there's something about a really well done creature that makes part of your brain forget that it's not real and give out a childlike "wow" when you see it. I got that from the aforementioned Kong and probably felt it most strongly, in recent years, during the Hippogriff flying sequence in the third Harry Potter movie. I did not get it here. So that was a big problem. You don't go to a movie like this for the story, but the story here is clearly trying to be some kind of tremendous epic thing, complete with Christ symbolism. This is, frankly, tiresome and way too common in movies nowadays. Probably why movies with brooding antiheroes are becoming so popular. What the story does well is to facilitate the thing we're here to see other than the creatures, which is the landscape and design of the place. The characters go on a sort of tour, which lets them check out, however briefly, a couple of different civilizations, and those were pretty cool. The climax takes place in what appears to be a big proto-Great Pyramids at Giza, which is kind of neat, but again, the effects left me kind of cold. There was a lot wrong with Apocalypto, but the reveal of the great Mayan city was pretty undeniably staggering. This just felt like, ho-hum. Big ancient CG city. So, not too exciting. I'm glad I didn't pay to see it, but I was fairly amused, and not always at the movie's expense. I look forward to watching bits of this late at night on HBO with my stepfather, when I visit my folks--that's how I usually see movies like this. If you use this, this is Phool2056 from the boards. Thanks.