10,000 BC. What a pile of crap. Out now! (*1/10)
10,000 BC is unfortunate in that it occupies some distressing middle ground. It IS too stupid to be a movie, but not stupid enough to be hilarious. Which means it is just one long, boring, irritating, idiotic ball of suck. This movie has absolutely no idea what it’s doing. Ostensibly, it’s about a clan of cavemen from the mountains. Cavemen who are not especially hairy, and who seem to have a fairly good command of the English language. Which is fine, if you want to just assume that they know English, so the movie can be in English. Like in Hunt For Red October, where all of a sudden they started speaking English. That was fine. We, the movie-goers accept that. But the cavemen in this movie (so we don’t forget they’re primitive) talk in broken English. Look - they couldn’t possibly know English. It’s one of those suspension-of-disbelief movie devices. Why not make them at least competent in English?
Then, the hero of the story kills a mammoth by himself, and becomes…the hero of the story. But his heart is torn, because his new status means he will get to be with his girlfriend, but he knows he was only half-assed attempting to kill the mammoth, and whole-ass running away from it. So, it being a matter of honour, he…camps thirty feet outside the village. What? It’s a good thing he does though, because it means he can see his gorgeous girlfriend (who wears makeup the whole time, by the way) get kidnapped by a marauding band of thugs on horseback. Who speak another language! With subtitles! NO ONE KNOWS A LANGUAGE YET! Make them all English!
Then the narrator comes in, several times, talking about “many moons this” and “many moons that”. Ummm…OK…so now they’re native? And the narrator, who talks like he is one of the tribe, is British? Or is he modern…ancient…native…British…demented? We just plain don’t know. Or care. What we DO care about are things like - why don’t they just call the mammoth a mammoth? They’re speaking ENGLISH, why don’t they have the ENGLISH word for things? Why call it a maddott, or whatever word they’ve invented. And why does the bad guy have a computer-generated voice when he isn’t even speaking ENGLISH? And at the end of the movie, when the good guys triumph over the aliens, did they do a ‘hip-hip-hooray’ cheer?
Yes, I said aliens. And Gods, and supreme beings, and slavery, and pyramids, and a bizarre scene where the hero talks down a sabre-toothed tiger. (By the way, THOSE things look bad-ass. Why don’t the fight those, instead of the giant Moas?) But anyway, who cares? This movie stinks so bad that nothing could redeem it. The great thing, usually, about caveman movies, is the loincloth-wearing brief glimpses of nudity. Well…that and Ringo Starr. And there’s none of that here - after all, this movie needed to keep it’s PG rating to reach a wider audience. So no nipples, no nudity. But lots of loincloths and exposed skin. This, despite the fact that they’re in the mountains. So, they’re basically wearing bikinis on a glacier. And we’re basically turning this off at the twelve minute mark.