10,000 BC aka 10,000 (B)latant Ina(c)curacies

My God, where do I start… I haven’t seen such non-historical drivel since A-pile-a-crap-to.

10,000 BC came via Netflix yesterday, so Laura and I watched it last night to see how bad it might actually be. To be fair, I’ll start with what worked:

• Vast sweeping panoramic shots.
• Decent special effects. (Although mammoths can’t “gallop”, they were pretty stunning in their CGI actualization. Furthermore, since when have archeologists found evidence of domesticated desert mammoths?!?)
• The movie isn’t over two hours long.

And that’s about all I can come up with. Here’s a small bit of what is wrong with it:

• Wooden acting. I’ll forgive the fact that the cavemen are speaking modern English, but what the hell was the middle eastern accent for when they were apparently from southern Europe. Casting Richard Dean Anderson or William Shatner would have worked just as well.
• The anachronistic errors in this movie boggle the mind. I understand that the director/writers weren’t going for a historically accurate documentary here, but come on… mammoths coupled with Egyptian pyramids coupled with metal working and horse riding? Really?!?
• Plot — or lack thereof. I’ve seen better character development in episodes of Spongebob Squarepants. ‘nuff said.
• Allusions to Atlantis, prophecies, aliens, telepathy, etc. This seems a common theme in Emmerich’s wildy impossible, apocalyptic films. I can enjoy being entertained by such notions in a story, but he never provides anything to substantiate such claims and they generally end up giving his films yet another layer of discredit. Fail.

From the IMDb site, I am on the same page as this guy:

I spy with my little eye… Swiss, Eskimos, Arabs, Egyptians, Indians, Native Americans, Celts, Zulus, Masai, Ethiopians…
The film starts by introducing us to a Multi-culti tribe in Switzerland (?) led by a shaman Eskimo woman. They seemed to have forgotten that prehistoric hunter gatherers generally wandered around and fill instead their days by waiting all year in their village for mammoths to meander by and kill one for food which luckily lasts all year.

Their ‘noble’ existence is shattered by some Arab horsemen looking for slaves. They leave the Alps into the jungles (!) of Italy(?) where they are attacked by birds which once lived in South America. The scenery changes to Utah as they track the slavers into Africa. They meet some Zulu tribes who happened to have bumped into the Swiss hunter’s father and who somehow managed to teach the Zulu tribe the one language that seems to exist in Europe.

The Arab desert slavers have attacked the zulus too so the Swiss and the zulus combine forces to attack the slavers. Rather than follow the river (the Nile?) to the slave town, they decide to cross the Sahara (after all there’s no food or water by a river so this would seem a sensible option!).

After wandering around for weeks they look to the stars and decide to follow the North Star (the slave city, in common with Santa’s hideaway is under it apparently). Hey ho, after a few days they find slave city and it turns out to be a pyramid construction site led by an alien. Luckily, the crafty alien god has lots of slaves and a ready source of desert living woolly mammoths to help build his pyramid. Swiss hunter cries ‘operation desert freedom’ and the slaves rebel.

The alien god’s Indian eunuchs (fresh out of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom)and some albino africans flee to a giant ship stored in a pyramid but the rebelling slaves catch them up and kill the giant alien who turns out to be ‘Lurch’ from the Adams family.

Eskimo woman then dies back in the Alps to bring Swiss hunters girlfriend back to life in the Sahara (she’s prophetic as shes got blue eyes — apparently rare we’re led to believe in Switzerland).

The film ends with the desert dwelling Zulus giving the Swiss crops which somehow grew in the Sahara. The Swiss then set off home surely cursing that they set Lurch’s giant boat alight as it surely would have sped up their journey across the Mediterranean. They have a group hug back in the Alps when their desert crops begin to grow at the foot of a glacier…

See it if you must, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.