Published at: March 4, 2008, 9 a.m. CST by merrick
For those with attention spans too short to absorb an entire review, here is my one liner: This film is fucking retarded, even by Roland Emmerich's standards.
That's my DVD pull quote. Use it.
Honestly, I may not have had high expectations going in (the name "Roland Emmerich" does little for me, and the poster left me a bit uninspired), but I was still prepared to be surprised by it. I was hoping to be surprised by it. I was surprised, but only by how unintelligibly awful it was.
The film begins with a voice over that will make Rob McKee roll over in his grave (yes, I know he's still alive, I just assume he sleeps in a grave). Though I can't remember it verbatim, I'm going to attempt my own version of the introductory narration:
It is said that legends live where truth dies... and if the passage of time teaches us anything about truth, it's that a legend cannot die. But there is one legend whose truth will become a thing of legend, and in time, will be whispered upon the seven winds of the earth, and will then be the world's truest legend.
Okay, an opening speech from some character we never see that talks to me as if I received late onset retardation is one thing, but it's shoehorned in whenever the filmmakers feel the audience may not quite get what is going on. It's also done so with the most try-hard prose you've ever heard. Again:
As the moons passed and the days slipped past, the trackers moved over yellow hills of unprocessed glass.
Don't you mean fucking sand? Just say it. Fucking sand. Okay, the "yellow hills of unprocessed glass" is my invention, but it's not far off the type of phrases employed.
The characters themselves speak English. This is fair enough. Thought it bugs me a little, I'm not going to fault a film for adjusting the language for its audience. They're all speaking in some random EuroMiddleEast accent (and Russian for one particularly random scene), so that's fine, do what you have to. But then the bad guys show up, and they're suddenly speaking some mysterious language that our main characters don't understand, but we do thanks to subtitles. Wait, so they speak some other language? So is the film saying our main characters are literally speaking English? What's the go here? And why do all the bad guys speak as though they're talking into a voice processor? Xerxes worked in 300 because that film was over-the-top and highly stylised. You just want these guys to look evil. It's not enough that you went through Mel Gibson's casting book to find the most hook-nosed, ugly Middle Easteners you could find, but they all have to sound like a Trent Reznor b-side?
Even if you're someone who can overlook all this, I pray you're not so brain damaged that you can't overlook the Microsoft AutoScript screenplay that does absolutely everything you expect it to. In retarded plot point after retarded plot point, we get our main character helping to free a sabretooth tiger for ABSOLUTELY NO REASON WHATSOEVER other than it will become important two scenes later; the father figure character making his best friend (and our main character's mentor) promise to not tell anyone that he's gone off to look for better land for his people, because for some reason it's important that everything think him a coward and deserter... explain that, Emmerich; there's the laziest, laziest, laziest fucking stupid use of the worst story device ever -- prophecies and "chosen ones" -- that's used at least three times by my count, without relation to each other; and there's the fact that apparently 12 000 years ago, we had magic. Yes, because it's "old", that means there's magic.
There are too many anachronisms to pick at (check the internet in the coming weeks, it's going to be quite funny to see them all pointed out), but I, for one, would like to know where Emmerich thinks the film is set. Okay, we have our colony of Caucasians who live high in the mountains, and when they walk for a little bit, they're suddenly in Africa and Surrounded By Black People. Then they keep traveling and find themselves in Egypt. At least, I assume it's Egypt. All of the bad guys are quite Arabic, and they're building a bunch of pyramids in the desert. So, given Egypt is in northern Africa, and our characters clearly traveled Africa, I'm guessing they were in... hang on... trying to compute this... okay, here we go: Narnia. Narnia, which used to be attached to Africa, and which, in 10 000 BC, was filled exclusively with white, well-built, chiseled-features characters.
There is an important message in this film, and I'd be being unfair to it if I didn't acknowledge it. It's quite pertinent to our time, and I think Emmerich was really commenting on our society with the film's central message: black people and white people can come together to kill Arabs. Seriously, I'm welling up with its inherent beauty.
The script feels a lot like it was run through the ringer featured so brilliantly in THE PLAYER. It feels like there was an amazing initial idea, perhaps a dialogue-free film about a hunter trying to take down a wooly mammoth, or going mano-a-felino with a sabretooth. I say it feels like that, but I don't give Emmerich that much credit. Though I'm sure some elements, like the Most Retarded Narration Ever, might have been added after a poor test screening, I think the majority of the dumbness was planned from the beginning.
If I didn't consider my time valuable, I would have really enjoyed how bad this film was. I mean, I'm usually pretty silent if I don't like a film, but I was quite happy to laugh loudly throughout this one. It was the only way I could enjoy it, so to hell with it.
Do not, do not, do not waste your time and money on this piece of extraordinary shit. Do anything else instead.
