Mr. Emmerich has made something of a specialty in staging — with maximal bombast and minimal coherence — end-of-the-world scenarios. (See “Independence Day” and “The Day After Tomorrow,” though not on the same day if you can help it.) In the context of his oeuvre “10,000 BC” might be thought of as a kind of prequel, an attempt to imagine human civilization not on the brink of its end, but somewhere near its beginning.
Yet even as the story begins, the old ways seem to be dying out, as the Yagahl, a tribe of snuffleupagus hunters who favor extensions in their hair and eschew contractions in their speech, prepare for their last hunt. In fulfillment of an old prophecy, raiders on horseback (“four-legged demons”) arrive to sack the Yagahl encampment and take a bunch of the tribespeople as slaves. Among them is the blue-eyed Evolet (Camilla Belle), whose beloved, D’Leh (Steven Strait), sets out with his mentor, Tic’Tic (Cliff Curtis), to rescue her.
Along the way D’Leh and Tic’Tic have many adventures, involving bizarrely costumed humans and computer-generated creatures, among them a scary race of flesh-eating swamp ostriches. These reminded me of nothing so much as the angry chicken, designed by the stop-action maestro Ray Harryhausen, that menaces some castaways in Cy Endfield’s 1961 curio “Mysterious Island.” And at its best — which may also be to say at its worst — “10,000 BC” feels like a throwback to an ancient, if not exactly prehistoric, style of filmmaking. The wooden acting, the bad dialogue, the extravagantly illogical special effects may well, in time, look pleasingly cheap and hokey, at which point the true entertainment value of the film will at last be realized.
Meanwhile back in the present, there is an awful lot of high-toned mumbo-jumbo to sit through. On his journey D’Leh (it’s pronounced “delay,” though most of the time he’s in a pretty big hurry) gathers a multicultural army to oppose the pyramid-building, slaveholding empire that has been bothering the more peaceful agrarian and hunter-gatherer tribes. These decadent priests seem like a curious hybrid of the Egyptians in “King of Egypt” and the Maya from “Apocalypto.” To reach them D’Leh travels overland from his home on the Siberian steppes through the jungles of Southeast Asia to the grasslands of Africa. But back then I guess it was all Gondwana, so the trip was easier.
Other movies D’Leh (or rather Mr. Emmerich) makes his way through include “The Searchers” and “Ice Age,” though nothing in “10,000 BC” approaches the poetry of the scrambling squirrel and his errant acorn in “Ice Age.” Still, it is a mercy that the tigers and the other creatures don’t talk. It would be more of a mercy if the human characters, especially that narrator, observed similar discretion.
But the big, climactic fight, complete with an epic snuffleupagus rampage, is decent action-movie fun. And as a history lesson, “10,000 BC” has its value. It explains just how we came to be the tolerant, peace-loving farmers we are today, and why the pyramids were never finished.
“10,000 B.C.” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has a lot of violence, none of it terribly grisly.
10,000 BC
Opens on Friday nationwide.
Directed by Roland Emmerich; written by Mr. Emmerich and Harald Kloser; director of photography, Ueli Steiger; edited by Alexander Berner; music by Mr. Kloser and Thomas Wander; production designer, Jean-Vincent Puzos; produced by Michael Wimer, Mr. Emmerich and Mark Gordon; released by Warner Brothers Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes.
WITH: Camilla Belle (Evolet), Steven Strait (D’Leh) and Cliff Curtis (Tic’Tic).
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