Kim Gentes

Another good idea beaten with a club.

The idea of prehistoric man has always been intruiging to viewers of movies. It links our imagination with our humanity by placing what looks like regular people (with bad hair and low tech) back in a land of monsterous animals and mystical understanding.  10,000BC is another very good film concept.  But like my last review (Jumper) it turns out to be a good idea that seems to get the Jr. High School treatment from the filmmakers. The setting is the African continent, likely across the mid to northern parts of Africa leading from the Great Rift Valley through the Sahara to the Egyptian outlet of the Nile.  It is not completely clear where the journey begins, but it is possibly somewhere around Mount Kilimanjaro or Mount Kenya, and ends up in the early stages of the Valley of the Kings, where the pyramids are still under construction.

The story starts out being about a small tribe of hunting nomads who survive on herds of migrating mastadons.  As the creatures migrations slow down the tiny tribe is slowly dieing off.  A personal struggle is introduced and our protagonist is a young tribal leader named D'Leh, whose love interest is kidnapped by marauding horse riders.  In his quest to free and regain his love, D'Leh and several of his tribesmen wander through Africa, gaining tribes of men to help them against the mighty armies of the evil Egyptian empire.  What begins as a simple love story tries to end up being the ultimate movie about class struggle.  The movie has just two problems- no acting and no directing.  The story was strong enough it could have held a good script under its premise, but the writing and details here totally make the film fall flat.  This film in the hands of a master (Speilberg, Coen brothers, or even Gibson) would have been fun if nothing else.  But not only was the directing about as inspiring as 3 day old soda left in the sun, but the acting consisted of glistening-eyed-looks with pretty people headshots and not much else.

Every attempt at emotion and engagement with actual human characteristics falls dismally short of plausible.  The one thing that does work is the well done visuals and excellent set work.

If you have big screen HD TV, wait till this film comes out on BluRay DVD.  You may otherwise feel like you have lived through 10,000 years of tired, cold popcorn crumbs before this film is over on the silver screen. The film is PG13, but that may be simply because it was just too bad for kids under 13 to experience.  The rating here could have PG and it would have been fine. There are a couple scenes of battle and people getting killed in epic battle scenes, but nothing grisly, or frightful for children 10 or over.

Amazon Link: http://amzn.to/T6F5sZ

Review by Kim Gentes