10000 Reasons not to see 10000 BC…

Picture it – Egypt, 10000 BC.  Wild Mammoths, Terror Birds, and Spear Tooth tigers roam wild.  The Egyptians near completion of the Great Pyramid in Giza by employing the great Mammoth to transport giant blocks…

 

Ok, wait…  If you’re as confused as I am you should have sat through this movie last night.  The new box office flop, 10000 BC directed by Roland Emmerich was bludgeoned upon the public last Thursday and is already leaving theaters empty.  I had high expectations for this movie as I believe many who saw it did.  First off I don’t know what the hell Mr Emmerich was thinking here, at all.  How are you going to spoon feed a movie with MAJOR, MAJOR inconsistencies to a market of history buffs?

 

This movie made my teeth clench almost the whole way through.  I was trying to stay open to it, REALLY trying to keep an open mind but as soon as the prehistoric people dropped a net made of woven rope on the CGI mammoth I knew I was in for a bumpy ride.  My first question is where did they get this rope?  Home Depot?

 

After that the movie continues on with an overdone story of a woman taken from her lover, and lover’s desperate search for her.  Along the way he meets up with a Saber-Toothed Tiger which he befriends and assists him in filling the prophecy he was destined for.  He gains the trust and respect of many tribes and actually finds his woman before she’s swept away again and taken down the river on ships with sails…

 

ACK!  OMG at this point I was squirming in my seat.  They moved from the tundra, to the plains, to the JUNGLE, to the DESSERT!  All while facing the north star.  Where the fuck were they coming from?  I’m guessing that, on foot, they crossed through the Congo then the Sahara from somewhere in southern Africa maybe?  Anyway, I wanted to know where this magical continent with each temperate climate was pretty bad.

 

Once the captors boarded their ships and sailed up the Nile it was hard for me to stay in the theater.  They had pulleys, PULLEYS holding the SAILS on these ships in place.  You gotta imagine, I’m rubbing the grit from my face as the movie’s butchering history into a million pieces.

 

Skip ahead through the retarded desert scene straight to the Pyramids.  They focus in on the three structures still under construction, Mammoths hauling giant stones up ramps…  I CRINGED.  They find out that the people who have enslaved them, mainly a tall thin figured constantly shielded by a gossamer curtain and a bunch of small arabish people doing his bidding, came from either the stars or from the sea when their home sank into the ocean…

 

OK fuck the rest of the movie at this point, it totally lost me.  If it wasn’t so close to the 109 minutes that it ran I would have left but I decided to tough it out.  Considering the Great Pyramid wasn’t even built until about 7500 years later this is a FATAL inconsistency.  I don’t know how they expected ANYONE who went to high school to even sit through this.  I don’t see why they didn’t just take ATV’s through the desert and save a ton of time, or hell take the 2:56 train from South Africa to Chiro and save gas.

 

The Anunaki-like people were laughable; they had long gold fingernails like trite asian nemeses in 1950’s science fiction.  The underlings were reminiscent of the squat, effeminate Egyptian homos that are usually portrayed in old movies as baggage attendants at airports or bell boys in hotels.  And it was very multicultural for 10000 BC, I mean I’m all for equal opportunity employment in the movie industry but it seemed like they tried to put actors into stereotypical roles whose stereotypes wouldn’t be created for another few thousand years.

 

I do have to give it a few major props though.  There was absolutely NO product placement.  NONE.  And it had the best CGI big cat I’ve seen.  The mammoth scenes were pretty cool, and I would have liked the concept of the strange Egyptians if it would have been used in proper context.  That was the part that pissed me off the most really, I’ve been waiting for a good movie about prehistory and early man and this was NOT it.

 

Overall the movie seemed to be the product of an LSD laced pot party where the ideas always seem better when you were fucked up than they do on paper.  If you’re so inclined wait a few days for it to go to the dollar movie, then see it on half-off day because it’s not worth more than fifty cents.