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10,000 BC [2008]
from Warner Home Video
starring Steven Strait, Camilla Belle, Cliff Curtis, Joel Virgel, Ben Barga
directed by Roland Emmerich

Features:

• Digital Sound
• Dolby
• PAL
• Widescreen

Editorial Review:

To anyone who has ever yearned to see woolly mammoths in full stampede across the Alps, 10,000 BC can be heartily recommended. There's also a flock of "terror birds" (lethal ostriches on steroids) in a steaming jungle only a splice away from the heroes' snow-dusted alpine habitat. And lo, somewhere in the vastness of the North African desert lies a city whose slave inhabitants alternately teem like the crowds in Quo Vadis during the burning of Rome and trudge in hieratically menacing formations like the workers in Metropolis. That's pretty much it for the cool stuff. Setting movies in prehistoric times is dicey. Apart from the "Dawn of Man" sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, only Quest for Fire makes the grade, and its creators had the good sense to limit the dialogue to grunts and moans. 10,000 BC boasts a quasi-biblical narrator (Omar Sharif) and characters who speak in formed, albeit uninteresting, sentences (including a New Age–y "I understand your pain"). But let no one say the storytelling isn't primitive. The narrator speaks of "the legend of the child with the blue eyes" and bingo, here's the kid now. When, grown up to be Camilla Belle, she's carried off by "four-legged demons" (guys on horseback to you). The neighbour boy (Steven Strait) who hankers to make myth with her leads a rescue mission into the great unknown world beyond their mountaintop. His name is D'Leh, which is Held, the German for "knight," spelled backward. So yes, there is some hidden meaning after all.

10,000 BC is the latest triumph of the ersatz from writer-director Roland Emmerich. Like Stargate (1994), Independence Day (1996), and The Day After Tomorrow (2004) before it, it's shamelessly cobbled together out of every movie Emmerich can remember to pilfer from (though to be fair, the section in pre-ancient Egypt harks back to his own Stargate). Emmerich's saving grace is that his films' cheesiness is so flagrant, his narratives so geared for instant gratification, he can seem like a kid simultaneously improvising and acting out a story in his backyard: "P'tend there's this alien ... p'tend maybe he came from Atlantis or something...." Just don't p'tend it has anything to do with real moviemaking. --Richard T. Jameson

Customer Reviews:

• Avg. Customer Rating: 2.5 / 5.0

• Not that bad!
  I have to be honest, I was really dreading this film after some of the reviews I have read. My opinion is that OK, this film had a fairly flimsy story with no real depth, but as a fantasy adventure film it did an OK job. Granted it will never be a classic, but the effects were quite good, fairytale story... little people v big bad guys..... so all in all, probably never watch it again, but it was a alright Sunday afternoon no brainer of a movie.

• woo hoo!
  ...after 6 years constant research ive found a new worse film ever....a plotline so thin it could be posh's waistline, characters so flat they could all have been run over by a tank....and when they had mammoths building the pyramids i kind of mentally gave up...all this with a nasty little undertone of racism.....
  ive already fogotten the ending, but im sure it was 'happy'...

• it's Atlantis
  All those "historical incongruities" suddenly make sense when you pause the DVD at the point when there is a map of the known world lying on the table at the palace of the god-like king about two-thirds into the movie. The shot is a very quick one and maybe Roland Emmerich wanted cinema-goers to register the map on a mere subconscious level.
  Yet once the film is paused you can see a map showing the familiar outlines of Africa, Europe , the Middle East and ... South America! In the Atlantic Ocean... more info

• The woolly mammoths are fun!
  10,000 BC [2008]
  Appears to be a studio bound green screen shoot with some adequate CGI, the woolly mammoths are fun, but the sabre tooth tiger on steroids is a disaster.
  OH yes, the story, well just a hunt over snow filled plains and deserts to rescue villagers captured by slavers, acting adequate unto the limitation of the film.
  Placing the building of the first pyramids at 10,000BCE is not perceived wisdom but does accord with some alternative theories placing there building by an advanced... more info

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