Directed by Roland Emmerich, 10,000 B.C. is a tale dated in prehistory about a tribe of men bestowed with a prophecy from their Old Mother (Mona Hammond) about a blue-eyed child who will be the savior. A girl comes to the tribe because her home has been ravaged by a savage group of men. Our protagonist, D'Leh (Steven Strait), falls in love with the girl, named Evolet (Camilla Belle), and over time claims her as his bride when he kills a Mannak as a rite of passage. Yet the group of men who murdered Evolet's tribe come to capture D'Leh's people, and Evolet is taken by the Warlord (Ben Badra), who would love to have her all to himself. After that, D'Leh sets out with a few of his friends on a quest to get Evolet back, gathering like-minded tribes to conquer a territory that uses slaves to build pyramid-type architecture for a so-called sheet-covered god.
First off, 10,000 B.C. does a great job with its imagery. The backgrounds are lush, for the most part varied, and beautiful to look at. I liked how D'Leh and company traveled through snows, jungles, and deserts to get to Evolet; it shows the difference in climate from the past to the present. With the environments come different animals and terrors that the protagonist needs to face, and I thought that the film did a good job of quickly moving through each setting.
I also really enjoyed the way 10,000 B.C. handled the coming-of-age motif. To be a man, one must conquer a mammoth - I thought it was an interesting view on how prehistoric men may have felt about masculinity.
The film was rife with action, and it moves along at a pretty quick pace. The adventure is an entertaining one - there are many different situations that the troupe is faced with, but one of the points where the plot gets a little stale was when it repetitively forces D'Leh to let Evolet go because they could not overtake their opponents. I understand war needs tactical stratagem, but for the sake of the film, it felt too convenient that D'Leh could never force much in the way of conflict.
Article comments
1 - dhanley
I just finished watching this movie on DVD. I am a fan of the big screen but not a fan of the dollar outlay it requires, therefore a DVD borrowed from the library is rewarding in its own way. To the big media critics who love to sound smarter than all the rest of us and whose snark and snide never end, I say, movies are supposed to be fun. Just like baseball and dating, they are supposed to be fun. Professional critics of all kinds suck the fun from life while excusing their "superiority" as our great saviors of time and money. 10,000 B.C. is a fun movie. It has an imagination and wit lost on the self-important as not as urbane and refined as the New Yorker. It is no wonder to me why the New Yorker is rarely found in the average Americans home or why we, as a country, have eschewed the lure of the "intellectual" so enamored by lesser nations. We are a robust people never really requiring a "smart" class to lead us over the mountains, through the jungle to "bring them down," brave men and women have always been enough for us, cultured or not.