Director: Roland Emmerich
Writer(s): Roland Emmerich & Harald Kloser
Starring: Steven Strait, Camilla Belle, Cliff Curtis
Synopsis
When his tribe are attacked by mysterious raiders and a number of his people, including the woman he loves, are taken against their will, an outcast hunter forms a small band of warriors in order to track them down. Braving terrifying new creatures and unfamiliar terrain, the party are driven onward by love and honour, completely unaware that they will shortly become part of something much greater than their own quest…
Review
When you walk in to a Roland Emmerich movie, you know to expect one thing: spectacle. From worldwide cataclysm to a global alien invasion, the director makes use of every millimetre of the cinema screen, cramming it full of stunning vistas, spectacular battles and epic set-pieces, and spending every last red cent of his multi-million dollar budgets. If you’re looking for maximum bang-for-buck, you could do a lot worse. Emmerich’s take on prehistoric myth, therefore, was never going to be small-scale. Starting with a sweeping shot of snow-covered mountains that would make Peter Jackson weep, before kicking in some suitably-weighty narration from the Omar Sheriff, the movie grabs hold of your eyeballs from the first moment and refuses to let go for the next one hundred and ten minutes, dragging them on a visual tour-de-force that leaves you thankful that we live in an age where the CGI that makes it possible is commonplace.
Of course, visuals are only one part of a successful movie. Though George Lucas would probably argue the point, it also needs a story, and this is where 10,000 BC falls down a little. The plot concerns a stone-age Russell Brand lookalike dragging a suitably rag-tag bunch of mammoth-hunters across the planet in an attempt to rescue his girlfriend from a band of slave traders; bolted on to this — thus highlighting the film on SCI-FI-LONDON’s radar — is a fantasy-tinged subplot concerning an old medicine woman, a child with blue eyes, a bunch of slaves than seem to be left over from the STARGATE set and about half a dozen ancient(ish) prophecies that seem to concern the protagonist. This angle tarnishes the film a little, reducing what could have been a fun, if pedestrian, caveman adventure movie into an action flick with delusions of grandeur. The overall result is far from terrible, but it *does* leave you with a nagging feeling that the film could have been greater than it ended up. The dialogue, thankfully, fares a little better, starting off a little shakily (lots of clichéd “many moons” and “the fathers before our fathers” rubbish) but getting stronger as it goes along. It’s delivered by a solid cast, made up entirely of relative unknowns, whose talent as an ensemble thankfully sells some of the more ridiculous concepts (like the protagonist taming a sabre-toothed tiger, the whole pyramids angle or the film’s rather loose concept of geography) and helps keep everything together as a cohesive whole.
As a prehistoric fantasy movie 10,000 BC fails to impress, but as a family adventure movie it hits all of the right buttons. Thrilling, gripping and visually stunning in equal measure, it overcomes a faintly ridiculous ending to deliver a fast-paced, punchy blockbuster that’s well-worth a punt. As long as you’re not expecting the film event of the decade you’ll leave with a smile on your face – and you can’t say fairer than that.
Matt Dillon
10,000 B.C. is out on general release from Friday 14th March. Watch the trailer here