#1489: Worst Movies Ever – 10,000 BC

OH, WHAT THE HELL, ROLAND EMMERICH?

WHAT. THE. HELL.

10,000 BC is a fine example of technical achievement gone awfully wrong.  Sure, there’s breathtaking landscapes and detailed CGI animals of years gone by, but the setting makes no sense.   Emmerich must have taken a history book and thrown it in a blender, because I can’t even make heads or tails of what the hell he’s managed to piece together.

10,000 BC tells the story of a tribe who lives in the mountains in the days of prehistoric man.   They hunt woolly mammoth and rely on an old woman for advice about hunting and other prehistoric stuff, like building huts made out of logs and bits of mud, and building fires.   That’s all, really, that these people seem to do.

The hunting tribe finds a young girl with strange blue eyes who is the last of her tribe.   Her tribe and family were slaughtered by some mysterious dudes on horses, so this can’t bode well for anyone else.   The old woman instructs the tribe that the blue eyed girl will help fulfill a great prophecy and that she is very important.

This is where the real set of problems begins.

The story centers around Evolet – the blue-eyed girl – and D’Leh, a hunter in the tribe who fall in love with one another.   This is where I start to question someone’s rational thought process.

These people do not look prehistoric.

They look like homeless rastafarians.

This is where this movie fails miserably.   The basic principle of a large, grandiose epic like this is kind of a big sham.   No one goes to see these kinds of movies for the historical accuracy, but people want to feel like they’ve witnessed something vaguely historically accurate.   Take Gladiator, for instance.   There’s a lot of historically wrong stuff there, but that’s not necessarily the point.  It feels real and the story is good.   People pay to see these movies in large part to be deceived.

If you can’t even manage to deceive your audience for one moment…that’s kind of sad.

There’s just some things my brain can’t take, like the concept of pyramids built by woolly mammoths.   Yeah, there’s that.   Then there’s the stupidly trite love story; Evolet is kidnapped by the same guys that killed her family, and D’Leh is forced to save her.  It’s a gaping mess.   The story doesn’t keep you focused because from the first scenes, you already know how D’Leh and Evolet’s story will end.  Not even the computer trickery lends a hand here, because the filmmakers have thrown such an odd, random assortment of crap at you that you can tell it’s crap, no matter how stylized and glitzy it is.

It’s preposterous.   D’Leh and Evolet aren’t simple prehistoric folk; they’re merely cardboard cutouts of simple prehistoric folk, and even the most uncaring viewer can sense that.

It’s an absurd mess of a movie which is only capitalized by the fact that when you think about it, the worst of the worst that I’ve seen on here has been made for mere pittances.  This is an overblown, under-thought piece of egotistical insanity that cost millions and millions of dollars.

The pittance films I can excuse.  In an industry that watches the bottom line on films, you really have to wonder how a large group of people seriously thought this was an excellent movie to make.   What’s more depressing is that people sunk money hand over fist into this, enough money that would constitute a Powerball jackpot and for what?

Woolly mammoths and Camilla Belle dazedly dragging her rear end through scenes, complete with extreme CGI dinosaurs and sabretooth tigers.

I feel a little sad and empty inside.