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All Movie Info
Starring:
Camilla Belle, Steven Strait, Cliff Curtis, Omar Sharif, Tim Barlow, Mona Hammond, Mo Zinal, Gabriel Malema, Affif Ben Badra, Marco Khan, Reece Ritchie, Marco Khan, Joel Virgel, Nathanael Baring, Joel Fry, Suri van Sornsen, Joe Vaz, Kristian Beazley, Junior Oliphant, Louise Tu'u, Jacob Renton, Grayson Hunt Urwin, Farouk Valley-Omar, Charles Baloyi, Mark Simmons, Hannah Westbury, Antonio Fisher, Steven Afrikaner, David Dennis, Antonio Caprari, Matthew Navin, Nimiah Rodgers, Ben Hart, Ben Coyle-Larner, Joshua Peters, Mykhail Cohen, Janine Manuel, Kabelo Murray, Boubacar Badaine, Kolby Pistak, Heberth Somaeb, Sadrag Nakale
Directed By:
Roland Emmerich
Written By:
Roland Emmerich, Harald Kloser
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10,000 B.C. (2008)
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Movie Review by Jarrod 
March 8th, 2008
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'BC' is a terribly outdated way to classify periods of time, it was replaced by BCE, to denote "before common era" and AD was replaced by CE (meaning "common era"), these changes were made specifically to remove religious references, and Jesus and science are simply incompatible. None of this phased Roland Emmerich, with his latest film, '10,000 BC', which could best be described as a lame re-imagining of Mel Gibson's Apocalypto. It covers much of the same ground, but is set much further in the past, and does not quite pay as much attention to authenticity. Take, for instance, the fact that out of the tribes of cavemen we see here, some speak English and some don't. The special effects are not even that impressive, despite the large budget. The Mammoths and Sabertooth Tigers were actually rendered much more convincingly in Ice Age with computer animation. I half expected to see dinosaurs lumbering about, even though they had been extinct for millions of years; that is one detail Emmerich got right. Humans were still in the early stages of evolution, up against hostile environments and more imposing mammalian creatures that outweighed them by several tons. The mammoth, for its parts, was pretty much harmless, unless you make them mad, like a furry elephant really.
The main character, D'Leh (Steven Strait) hunts mammoths, and tries to deal with the stigma of being the child of a coward, since his father left the tribe when he was a boy. D'Leh will eventually emerge as the leader of his tribe, its strongest warrior, but he will have to overcome the trial of rescuing his love, Evolet (Camilla Belle), from those who have taken her, as both slave and sacrifice, which will of course prove his worth, and show his willingness to avenge the tribe after its village has been attacked and plundered. There are some battle sequences, the best one probably with the Sabertooth, but there also groups of human enemies to beat up, as well, slice and dice perhaps, but the camera constantly cuts away so as to safeguard the PG-13 rating by not showing much in the way of gore. A few severed limbs here and there would not have been so bad.
The movie runs out of steam rather early, becomes long-winded and tedious, largely because it takes itself a bit too seriously and does not contain enough action. The romantic aspects of the story are not explored too deeply, and we can all be grateful for that. Strait provides a superficial and forgettable hero, but he does display his chest a lot, which may be a plus. Some of the buildings here look like they were inspired by Mayan and Egyptian architecture, which is strange, but then temples are always more elaborate than anything else in ancient civilizations. The cinematography does have its moments, accentuating the natural beauty of the various settings, which include deserts and rain forests, habitats that are not usually that close together, so I wonder where exactly these events are supposed to have occurred.
Emmerich has made this movie (or parts of it) somewhat entertaining, but he should have a better sense by now of what makes an effective blockbuster; he did, after all, do Independence Day and the atrocious Godzilla, along with The Patriot and the absurd Day After Tomorrow. Independence Day is the best of that lot, for what it is worth. In addition to Apocalypto, I suppose Emmerich drew inspiration also from the pulpy trash of One Million Years BC, where Raquel Welch modeled an alluring prehistoric bikini, ignoring, of course that the title implies an era where humans had not yet come into existence. But then, nobody watched that movie to ponder its scientific inaccuracies. They won't this one, either.
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 | Jim
Mar 10, 2008 10:29 PM
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Consider this as an opening line for a movie review:
"'BC' is a terribly outdated way to classify periods of time, it was replaced by BCE, to denote "before common era" and AD was replaced by CE (meaning "common era"), these changes were made specifically to remove religious references, and Jesus and science are simply incompatible."
What do these idiotic generalities have to do with...uh...a film?
So long as people are still using BC and AD, obviously, these ways of referring to our standard division of time are not out of date. It is true that BCE and CE are standard in Biblical criticism, but AD and BC have not been consistently replaced in all scholarship, much less in mass culture.
Furthermore, saying "Jesus and science are utterly incompatible" demonstrates about as thorough an ignorance of the history of science as of the history of Christianity.
Stick to film reviews, man, and leave aside the armchair, hand me down philosophizing. |
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Mar 10, 2008 10:56 PM
Mar 10, 2008 11:07 PM
But, if you want to remain ignorant, go ahead...keep believing the nonsense you've been fed.
Mar 10, 2008 11:49 PM
But then I have also read Catholic narratives about Martin Luther and forms of heresy that were punishable by death and extremely bizarre views on sexuality, notably masturbation, sodomy, and contraception, which have not changed all that much. I appreciate your comments; never expected to get a response quite like this.
Mar 11, 2008 7:33 AM
You should probably check out papal encyclicals on evolution -- there are two significant ones in the 20th century, one in the 1950s and one by Pope John Paul II -- I don't recall if his was in the 80s or later. It's a misrepresentation of "religion" to identify it with "Creationism," just as it's a misrepresentation of intelligent design to identify it with creationism.
Creationism is a fundamentalist phenomenon just as much dependent upon very literal interpretations of Scripture (that weren't historically the norm until Luther) as it is dependent upon invective against evolutionary theory.
I am saying this to point out a pattern -- the identification of what is really fundamentalism with Christianity. There's a very wide range of Christian belief regarding evolutionary theory and contraception, at any rate. The Catholic church has no problem with evolutionary theory but a big problem with contraception; most Evangelicals have no problem with contraception and vary in opinion about evolution, many tending toward some kind of creationism, but if they're influenced by intelligent design theory, they can accept evolutionary theory as a partial explanation of human development. Only fundamentalists have problems with both evolutionary theory and all forms of contraception.
I'm not sure where you're getting your sexual norms -- what establishes "normal" human sexuality to you, so that the Catholic Church's teachings are "bizarre." What validates your sexual norms? The RCC teaches that human sexuality serves two purposes: unitive (creates an emotional and spiritual bond between people -- do you think that's bizzare?) and procreative, sex being the means of continuing the species. Do you think sex as a means of procreation is bizzare?
What you're probably thinking of: rejection of homosexuality as a valid form of human sexuality, rejection of contraceptives, and a rejection of divorce are simply ethical imperatives that logically follow from the belief that sex is for procreative and unitive purposes. Since sex unites us, we shouldn't get divorced. Since sex is for procreation, we shouldn't use birth control or engage in non-procreative sex.
The logic is fairly hard to escape. What you and most people really disagree with here is that sex is -exclusively- for -both unitive and creative purposes-; it can be one without the other or for recreational purposes. The RCC di