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10,000 B.C.
Reviewed by Theo Michelfeld
Posted: March 11, 2008

Talk about retro. Forget Will Farrell and his obsession with the 1970s. The new Roland Emmerich film takes us back to 10,000 B.C., where the Neanderthals are incongruously articulate, and a Geico commercial seems prone to break out at any given moment.

10,000 B.C. follows the adventures of a hero named "D'leh," which is pronounced "delay," as in "We apologize for the delay." D'leh is a mopey, self-doubting every-caveman with a body by GNC and an overall bearing like Adam Duritz, the lead singer for Counting Crows. Despite the screenwriters' efforts to spin a variation off of Luke Skywalker, D'leh serves mostly to remind viewers of the vastly superior film Conan the Barbarian, in which the hero followed a much more authentic prehistoric ethos: Kick ass, fall down, get back up, kick some more ass. As it is, 10,000 B.C. features way too much MTV-style existential navel-gazing, as if its characters were not eating and breathing from a toxin-free environment, deprived of the curse of measuring their lives against the standards set by television, and pre-occupied with survival every waking moment. This caveman melodrama might better have been called 10,000 Years Before Zoloft.

The plot follows the sad-sack D'leh as he tracks down the bad guys who have raided his village and stolen his girlfriend. As it turns out, the villains are Egyptians collecting slaves to build their pyramids, and so it seems 10,000 B.C. is ripped from ancient headlines, although a quick glance at Wikipedia tells us the timeframe is slightly wrong by 8,000 years or so. But don't nitpick, folks. Some say time is only an illusion.

As for D'leh's girlfriend, she is every Neanderthal's dream, with blue eyes and exquisitely plucked eyebrows in lieu of a personality. In the interests of full disclosure, I hereby admit I may have been unfairly biased against this character, since she so closely resembles a girl from Smith College who dissed me at a Jane's Addiction concert in the late eighties.

Like so many recent Hollywood blockbuster-type movies, 10,000 B.C. features pathetically ineffectual villains who seem mostly to stand around, looking scary, and waiting to get vanquished. Indeed, even the beasts in this movie, whose CGI rendering is without a doubt the film's chief attraction, are disappointingly benign. Given the mostly-decent special effects, 10,000 B.C. is sure to have its fanboy supporters. But I defy any of them to tell me the sabre-toothed tiger wasn't a big letdown. Folks, how often do we get to enjoy a sabre-toothed tiger at the movies? Think about it. They're big, awesome, menacing, feline, and rarer by far than that old prehistoric standby, the T-Rex. Yet, here's our chance to finally behold the sabre-toothed tiger, and all the cat gets is maybe a minute-and-a-half of screen time, during which he acts like nothing more than a mascot for the film's tiresome human protagonist.

Folks, how do mistakes like this get made? Given the cynicism and shameless capitalism of Hollywood, how does a studio's board of directors allow its minions to ignore their chief asset right through to the closing credits? All anyone had to do was set the beast loose during the climactic slave uprising, and this film might have made $100 million more at the box office. Indeed, I might very well be declaring 10,000 B.C. worth your trouble if only this reasonable entertainment standard had been met. As it is, I'm tempted to go out and make my own film in answer to this one. After all, how hard can it be to serve up a mindless diversion like this? Rampage of the Sabre-Toothed Tiger. See that? All I've got is a title, and already it's a hoot.

Copyright © 2008 Theo Michelfeld