A movie about woolly mammoth-hunting cavemen
versus evil pyramid-building slave-traders was never going to be
Macbeth.
So once it's clear that this is going to be, well, junk, the real
question about 10,000 BC
becomes: is it painful, long-winded, self-important junk - or it is
fun, exciting, enjoyably silly junk?
And the good news is that this thinly disguised big-budget knock-off of
Mel Gibson's Apocalypso
is the kind of fast, fun and lightweight effort a good caveman movie
should be.
The
story starts off as a tangled mess of prophecies and legends about
impending doom and the blue-eyed girl who will become the chosen one of
the hunter who will save the tribe when the woolly mammoths stop coming
to their valley, but once the four-legged devils (AKA Arabic-looking
slave-traders on horseback) show up and grab the blue-eyed girl
(Camilla Belle) along with half the village, it's up to the hunter
D'leh (Steven Strait) to try and get her back.
Along the
way through some extremely confused geography (mammoths came to
mountains next to a desert full of African tribes?) he gathers an army
to him, which is lucky as the slaves are being used to build some
fairly pointless but very impressive pyramids under the direction of
some tall figure who either came from Atlantis or "the
stars".
The action is exciting without being too scary for the kids (though the
giant killer ostriches are pretty intense), and while the story is
pretty dumb a lot of the time, it's never insultingly so - when our
hero rescues a sabre-tooth tiger from a watery pit, it might not eat
him but it doesn't become his best friend either.
If you're fourteen then this is a great film; if you're not, it won't
send you to sleep.
3 out
of 5
10,000 BC
Australian release: 6th March, 2008
Cast: Camilla Belle, Steven Strait, Cliff Curtis, Omar Sharif Director: Roland Emmerich
Website:10,000 BC
