The idea for Roland Emmerich’s 10 000 BC must have occurred to its makers something like this: it’s Quest for Fire meets Stargate! Or maybe it’s One Million Years BC meets Land of the Pharaohs. Could be either. That is, it’s about prehistoric peoples, skin-wearing and so on, but let’s not make it too prehistoric — let’s get some pyramid-building in. OK, we know that according to mainstream Egyptologists the first pyramids were only built around 3000 BC or 2500 BC, but we can stretch a point.
Anyway, the Graeme Hancocks of the world and all those Fingerprints of the Gods types believe the Sphinx, at least, must be more like 14 000 years old, so what does it matter? And, besides, what does the ordinary punter care? Ten thousand years, 20 000 — what’s a few millennia among the ill-educated?
We don’t want to go too pyramidal, though — we also want some mano-a-mano action with, say, a woolly mammoth, and a sabre-toothed tiger. Right, not quite the right location if we’re in North Africa — woolly mammoths are very Northern Europe. But, hey, let’s try it, see if it works. We can probably get away with it. It would be great to get a pterodactyl in too, but since Jurassic Park everyone knows that dinosaurs didn’t walk the Earth, or fly it, at the same time as humans. Oh, well — we’ll focus on the woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers.
Hence 10 000 BC. As is to be expected from Emmerich’s other work (Independence Day, Godzilla), it looks fairly impressive on the macro level, and the action sequences are reasonably exciting. There are woolly mammoths and a sabre-toothed tiger. Thankfully, the characters don’t talk like contemporary Americans, these denizens of an age 12 millennia ago. The prehistoric tribe at the centre of the story, the Yagahl, is weirdly multi-ethnic and their accents oddly non-specific, like someone trying to speak Viking with a Middle Eastern touch. The ‘real” Africans, though, get to speak some kind of ur-African, and are subtitled. So are the evil raiders — and they look bizarrely Semitic. The most evil one looks like a Hoggenheimer caricature with a bad eye; this head, admittedly, is placed atop a Schwarzenegger body.
Despite the multi-ethnicity of the central group, the hero D’Leh (Steven Strait) is the most Caucasian-looking of them, and the heroine, Evolet (Camilla Belle), has legendarily blue eyes — she is, in fact, The Child with Blue Eyes (to be intoned in a portentously mystical way). D’Leh ends up leading various noble-savage African tribesmen, all in carefully differentiated ethnic gear, across the desert — as if he were some white bwana who has magically appeared to them out of the sky. He doesn’t seem do have to do much to convince them he is a great leader, but there you go. Scripts can do that with one tacky line stolen from Gunga Din or somewhere.
After a woolly-mammoth hunt, Evolet is kidnapped by raiders from Pyramidland (very Apocalypto, that), and D’Leh and a couple of companions, including wise older guy and callow but enthusiastic youth, go after her. The geography is as confusing as the ethnicities: we go from snow-clad mountains to African jungle, then across the desert to Pyramidland. Maybe the multi-ethnic Yagahl were living in the Atlas mountains, woolly mammoths and all? Or D’Luh, Tic’Tic and Ka’Ren went from Europe to Egypt via the Congo?
Perhaps it all takes place in some mythic zone in a past so distant the Earth was differently configured (but then don’t give us a specific period in the title). We get to Pyramidland, where the climax plays out, and we can do a bit of the Stargate stuff. Emmerich also directed Stargate; he’s obviously very interested in deeply peculiar pharaoh types. But, all round, 10 000 BC is much more of a rip-off of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto — down to a joke about chillies and someone getting stuck in a hole in the ground that’s filling up with water.
It lacks Apocalypto‘s manic narrative drive, though. The storyline is a tissue of thin old clichés that barely manages to creak into working order between the bits of action, and is unable to provide any meaningful characterisation. When it comes to the big plot points, Emmerich et al simply employ standard manipulative tricks — as in The Mummy Returns and the second Fantastic Four movie, the heroine gets killed and is then resurrected a few minutes later, just to make a complete mockery of any actual sympathy or feeling on the viewer’s part.
The special effects look impressive, or mostly so. The Great Pyramidland of CGI is striking. The woolly mammoths are nice, too, though they have that special galumphing gait of the computer-generated. (Instead of pterodactyls, by the way, we get vicious giant emus in the raptor role — Jurassic Park creatures with feathers.) The sabre-toothed tiger, however, is a deep disappointment — even worse than the pathetic lion in the recent Narnia film. Pity. A good sabre-toothed tiger would have made all that over-priced, under-developed hokum worthwhile.