[ 
Mood: Amused ]
Bearded men run around on Pangea somewhere between 60 million years ago and 10,000 BCE.
Rating:
Flow: **
Special Effects: *****
Character Development: *
Entertainment value: *****
Review:
I don’t even know where to start, but I will tell you right away, this movie was fantastic for all of the wrong reasons. I went with a group of other archaeology students and, before having seen the film, joked about having an anachronism drinking game. We’d have been drunk by ten minutes into the movie, and wouldn’t have remembered anything past fifteen minutes.
The film starts off in mountains somewhere (lets assume Europe, for the sake of a coherent geography). There is a group of people living in mammoth-bone tents (huzzah! something that really happened!). Among these people are D’leh (the main guy) and Evolet (the main girl, though she doesn’t do much), who apparently love eachother. You wouldn’t know it by the way they interact, but maybe that’s just how people showed their love back then. D’leh wins Evolet through a lie: he went on a mammoth hunt and took the mammoth down himself, but said that he did it on purpose. In reality, he caught his hand in the net (yes, they used a net to catch a mammoth). He admits his lie, and loses Evolet. And the white spear that has a crocodile-skull sheath.
Oh yeah, his father "abandoned" the village at an unknown time in the past.
Some "four-legged demons" (men on horseback) come by and steal Evolet and set the mammoth-bone tents on fire, so, of course, D’leh has to go get her. He takes the man who serves as his guardian, a friend, and some kid with him (you guessed it, the kid followed them, and then they grudgingly accepted him into the group).
What follows is, well, interesting. They travel from the mountains, over a very short bit of tundra, straight into the Chinese jungle (bamboo, karst topography), into grasslands, into desert and to the "head of the snake." They must have found a network of short-distance stargates or something, because they jumped everywhere but the Americas (don’t worry – the Americas were not completely left out).
Along the way, they gather some people to help them on their quest, which, after running into some Africans, becomes to go set a bunch of people free (oh yeah, the "four-legged demons are Egyptians who are off to collect slaves). All of these people follow the guy who belongs to "the people from the mountain" for reasons that I will not disclose and that you have probably already figured out. Additionally, there were two languages at 10,000 BC: English and Other, and fortunately they run into a guy who can speak both.
Along the way, they also encounter a slew of prehistoric beasts which (in some combination) should have been extinct, on another continent, or not domesticated. First is the largest mammoth ever (the bull – for some reason, they went hunting for the biggest and strongest instead of the weak guy). The only mammoth that came even close to that size is known only in North America. Second is the saber-toothed cat, which was far too big to be anything but Smilodon, extinct at 10,000 years ago and only known in North and South America. They then encounter some humongous Terror Birds, again known only in South America and spanning 62 million years ago to 2 million years ago. At some point, apparently, the Egyptians managed to domesticate mammoths (in the desert, yes) in order to help them build the great pyramids at Giza.
That’s not the only thing that the Northern Africans did. Apparently they also domesticated corn and chile peppers (both domesticated in Mesoamerica about 6,000 years ago).
I will not get into the archaeology – it would be too painful for me.
As far as dialogue goes, 10,000 BC contains the usual semi-accented mostly-contractionless semi-gramatically-incorrect speech that one would expect of such a movie. The dialogue does have some memorable moments, such as when D’leh realizes that it has to be dark out in order to see the stars. Really?
In short, this is a movie that must take place on Pangaea (to explain the geography) over some ridiculously long span of time. It is also hillariously inaccurate – the director really should have placed this on a different planet.
On a high note, the megafauna looked magnificent, if not a bit large. I suppose that the mammoths were given a bit of a trim, too, before heading to Africa, though not enough to make them elephants…
Clips and links!
Amazon.com
Trailer
Teaser
Side Note:
Sorry that I have not updated in a long time. My thesis was due yesterday, and I am currently in the middle of midterms. On a higher note, I’ve been accepted to graduate school, so my post rate will not go up anytime soon!