10000 BC Review

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I can’t believe I’ve fallen for the same old promotional trick again. When I saw the trailers for Roland Emmerich’s “10,000 BC” I got myself all worked up and and was so impressed with the CGI clips that I really believed the narrators insistence that this would be a more than a film, this would be a cinematic event.

I suppose that even a moments reflection would have told me that, as I had been consistently disappointed with nearly all of Mr Emmerich’s previous offerings such as “Independence Day”, “Godzilla” and “The Day After Tomorrow”, “10,000 BC” would be no less of a let down.

Now don’t get me wrong I’m was not expecting the emotional depth of the “Shawshank Redemption” or the narrative impact of “East of Eden”. I was essentially hoping for a rollicking dose of eye candy and more CGI trickery than I could shake a virtual stick at.

To be fair some of the CGI is pretty impressive stuff . The opening mammoth hunt is loud and hairy, the sabre tooth snarls effectively (the CGI one not the Muppet stand in they use for the head shots) and the massive punch up in the pyramid city are all done with vast amounts of processing power.

With a few gorgeous women thrown in (and Camilla Belle as the fawning ‘Evolet’ certainly falls within the gorgeous category), you would think that this cerebrally challenged, male chauvinist pig would have been pretty happy with Mr Emmerichs product.

Alas even I couldn’t ignore this films short comings. It’s not the fact that the film is wildly historically inaccurate, it’s not supposed to be a palaeontological essay, nor is it that it wanders into farcical mythology.

Far more infuriating, to the extent that it actually managed to interfere with the pursuit of my shallow pleasures, was the implausibly sparse plot and lamentable casting.

Now if I told you that the girl is snatched from her primitive village by slave trading pyramid dwellers and that the love of her life, having returned from hunting mammoth computer graphics, sets off on a journey to rescue her, you would be forgiven for thinking you’d seen this film before. That”s because the plot seems to have been lifted directly from Mel Gibson’s far superior ‘Apocalypto’.

However, unlike ‘Apocalypto’ which draws the viewer into an ancient world through the empathy one feels for the central characters struggle for survival against interminable injustice, ‘10000 BC’ has all the emotional resonance of strip lighting.

Stephen Strait (no I didn’t know who he was either), who plays the central protagonist D’Leh, is expected to carry the film through prolonged periods of simpering mysticism. Unfortunately, and slightly unfairly perhaps, this is asking too much of Mr Strait. Certainly he is capable of running about very vigorously, lobbing massive spears as terrified mammals and I wouldn’t argue if he spilt my pint, but ‘leading man’? I don’t think so.

So in short if you’re male and you’ve gone shopping by mistake or are 15 and full of little other than hormones this film still wouldn’t provide much of a diversion. A better option would be to get the DVD of ‘One Million Years BC’ and watch Raquel Welch hide from plasticine lizards.

write by Ciara