10,000 BC

Hi Aki,

So I watched 10,000 BC and liked it a lot more than I expected to. In fact, I did actually like it!

Omar Shariff does the narration. I have always liked him and he’s been in a few movies I love, so it’s just so nice to hear his voice. There are moments when his age shows in the voice, which is too bad, but other moments when his pleasure in just telling the story is powerful.

The cast is mostly unknown to me. This is good. Distracting to see Brad Pitt as Achilles in Troy, but here there was no ‘that’s a movie star in a loin cloth!’ objection.

Another good thing about the cast is that there were so many different ethnicities (no Asians, alas, even though it takes place in Asia, I guess – but central Asia from Siberia down to say Iraq or Egypt). This gave it an exotic look that helped to transport me into its foreign world.

There were lots of surprises in the movie. The central story is a quest: raiders take slaves from a small tribe far in the snowy north, including a girl beloved by the hero. So he and a couple friends go to rescue her. Every 15 minutes the landscape changes completely from snowy mountains to jungle, to savannah, to desert, to arid plain. And each new tribe/culture the rescuers meet is a different kind and level of civilization, mostly getting more and more sophistication until they run into the descendents of Atlantis – or are they aliens landed on earth?

This means it’s not easy to get bored. If you don’t like one setting, hold on – it will change.

Of course a movie like this is impossible without massive budgets and digital effects, and the digital stuff looked very good at least on a television.

There was not much to recommend the acting. A Roland Emmerich movie is not written to give the actors much emotions to emote, it’s mostly action. Only the narrator got to really go to town, and one old lady from the siberian tribes, their wise woman, who accompanied the rescuers through visions, helping when she could in a semi-mystical way.

The ending is cheesy of course, because it’s Roland Emmerich! And it’s for kids! And there are multiple problems if you try to think, and consider it as actually representing any past epoch on earth. The Siberians hunt wooly mammoths and yet believe it’s impossible to leave their valley – but the mammoths come and go? Men ride horses thousands of years before horses were bred big enough to support a man. Men from the far north are wandering across deep desert in equatorial regions without even getting sunburned. And so on.

But this is a kids’ movie, and you have to just put aside your brain when you go in the theater and let it take you wherever it wants to go, and enjoy it for what it is.

In North America the movie was ill-served by the ad campaign, which just went for cheap thrills without communicating the unfolding sense of wonder the film gives. They showed some of the different cultures in a way that just looked like a stew of random elements thrown together in the commercial; but in the movie, Emmerich takes us carefully from one place to a slightly-different place, to one even more different, so it seems more organic.

Quest For Fire is an obvious inspiration, and this movie just can’t compare to that one – quest is a masterpiece compared to this. Quest was also a serious effort to depict what it might have been like before agriculture, at the end of the last ice age. This one is trashy fun, and for what it is, it’s very good.

(written around 8 March 2009)