10,000 B.C. (spoilers)

I know that admitting what I am about to admit could essentially ruin any credibility I have as someone who reviews movies, but I dug The Day After Tomorrow. Roland Emmerich, the guy who directed 10,000 B.C. also directed The Day After Tomorrow as well as the awesome Independence Day, the terrible Godzilla and the alright The Patriot. He makes big spectacle pictures that are often high on fun but low on everything else. I readily admit that The Day After Tomorrow is not a good movie, but I enjoyed the hell out of it. A year after the epic 300 we get 10,000 B.C., the 2008 version of 300. What I mean by that is that we get a big budget movie in the middle of March feature something pre-historic almost. Yet, with Emmerich's spotty record would this turn out like Independence Day , Godzilla or somewhere in between?

I will now attempt to tell you the plot of this movie, but I have to be honest, I am not quite sure I ever really understood what was going on. Some of it was because of bad storytelling and some of it is because during the exposition voice over opening, there was a child crying in the theater. What I understood was this- a little girl with startling blue eyes, Evolet(Camilla Belle is found by this tribe of cavemen (when I say cavemen, don't think of cromagnen people, no these are gorgeous people who speak perfect English)and the spirit mother of the tribe believes this blue eyed girl is the key to survival for the tribe and the guy who gets her will lead the tribe. Our hero D'elh (held backwards because "held" is the German word for Hero, brilliant I know). He is a Mammoth hunter but his father deserted the tribe and he is kind of a weakling, at first. These creepy big guys come into the tribe destroy it and kidnap all the males and of course Evolet. D'elh was not amongst the captured and he sets off to find Evolet. Along the way he manages to meet a ton of tribes of people who all seem to speak different languages, but luckily one guy seems to know them all. These separate tribes of people all join forces to fight the big bad gods. The Gods are kidnapping people to turn them into slaves to build the pyramids, so maybe the Gods are supposed to be Egyptian? If that means they are near Egypt where did the tribe learn English? Who knows?!?!

10,000 B.C. is such a bad movie I very nearly walked out of it. "How could a movie that had access to Saber Tooth tigers be so awful?", you ask. Easy, the Saber Tooth tiger spends 3 minutes on screen and doesn't do anything bad-ass. In fact the Saber Tooth tiger is as harmless as an every day house cat in the movie. The only fierce creatures appear to be some sort of hybrid between a Raptor and a dodo bird. What the hell? The Mammoth's look gorgeous, the tiger looks gorgeous, but they are merely window dressing to try and disguise the fact that nothing in the movie makes sense. The one remaining God fears the one with the mark, which some what turns out to be Evolet, but she doesn't do the killing at all, so the whole mark nonsense turns out to be useless and just a way to add time to the movie. The story makes no sense and every time the movie switches back to the old mother woman I was just lost in the stupidity. The acting is god awful, but at least Evolet is gorgeous. The dialog is useless, as Emmerich seems only interested in creating a faux epic with wide circular motioned shots of sprawling snow capped mountains, but it all amounts to nothing.

This movie lacks the sheer audacity of The Day After Tomorrow, it even lacks the goofy stupidity of Godzilla and the over the top nonsense of The Patriot; in short, the movie has no fun with itself. Emmerich was really trying to make a big drama set in a pre-historic time period and it blew up in his face miserably. The battle sequences are dull, the chases lack a sense of urgency. I mentioned 300 earlier and I think some of the comparisons they are drawing are fair. Both are movies that take a liberal use of history to tell a crazy story, but 300 has fun while telling the story. 300 had amazing visuals, a fun story, incredible action sequences, and a strong presence in the lead actor to mask the awful dialog, whereas 10,000 B.C. doesn't have enough to make up for the obvious shortcomings. The worst thing a movie can be, in my opinion, is boring. Boring is the kiss of death for a movie and I was checking my watch about 30 minutes in because I kind of wanted it to just be over.

I left with an overwhelming sense of disappointment because I was pretty excited about this movie. Not because it is historically accurate or even because I thought it would be this amazing movie, but because deep down, I love to be entertained by over the top messes and this looked like it would at least be that. Instead it was just a mess. It was timid, small scale and I never felt the stakes were high enough for me to care about anything that was going on. I was not alone in my disappointment either. I heard the disgust in the voices of the other people leaving the theater.

Final Grade: F