Reznet

Flop of Mammoth Proportions

By Troy Doney

"10,000 BC" is the latest film from Roland Emmerich, the guilty party behind "Universal Soldier," the 1998 remake of "Godzilla" and "The Day After Tomorrow." A movie like "10,000 BC" hasn't come around in a long time. Not because we haven't seen a movie about pre-history, no. It has been a long time since I've seen a movie so unredeemable.

The cast is phoning it in. Overacting like they're on non-prescription stimulants, the melodrama ringing hollow. A major flaw of the cast is that they must've been told to speak in Noble Savage Pentameter. Everyone in the cast seemed to be speaking through molasses. Unlike Iambic Pentameter, Noble Savage Pentameter is speaking slowly with small words in short, declarative sentences, almost always with short pauses between words. Normally reserved for culturally ignorant movies about Native Americans, this insulting acting method was brought back to stand in for actual acting and dialogue.

Not that acting was asked of the cast. What becomes obvious is that the players were asked to recite lines while dressing in the most ludicrous and uninspired of costumes. We may not have the most definitive of records when it comes to human history in the pre-historic ages, but research and calling up a university or two couldn't have hurt. Instead, we have various cultures and people designed with what seems to have been 15 minutes of time, a quart of Haagen-Dazs, and a cursory look at the work of Edward Curtis.

Steven Strait played D'Leh, the protagonist. At various points in the movie, we're supposed to see him as a hero, an inspiration, a man who simply will not give up. It's hard to imagine someone failing any more impressively. It's not entirely his fault, as the lines he has to deliver would be difficult for anyone to say out loud without grimacing. That said, he has the emotional palate of unassembled Ikea furniture. Wooden, dusty and soulless. Far from cheering on this primeval Moses, you find yourself laughing at his multiple serious pratfalls, Shatner-esque lines of mind numbing silliness and perturbed by his lack of emotions. You're off to a bad start when the star confuses anger with yelling loudly.

I could mention how Camilla Belle played the love interest Evolet with the emotional intensity of a bell pepper. I have the ability to talk about how she was just as entertaining as a bell pepper. It's within my abilities to go on and on about how she makes every scene that she's in an indulgence in dullness. But that would get repetitive after three sentences, and I'd have to apply that to every other actor in this 'period drama.' Instead, I will say that Belle did what must have been asked of her, which was look very pretty, say stupid things, and dress absurdly. To that extent, she performed serviceably.

Cliff Curtis played the painfully named Tic Tic, the mentor of D'Leh. Apparently, the writers lost their ability to think up quasi-pre-historic names and were just spelling out sounds that they were hearing in the room at the time. Let's be thankful that he's Tic Tic because of a loud clock, and not Flush. Curtis doesn't have to say nearly as many absurd things as the rest of the cast, which you think would be okay. That's until you realize that he spends most of the movie wounded and unconscious. His progress through the film is walking to a wounding, recovering and then walking to his next wounding. It's a process he repeats until his inevitable death and unavoidable death-bed inspiration speech.

The villains of the flick were (in no particular order) inept, non-intimidating, mentally defective and childish to the point of hilarity. Be they the slaver raiding parties with bad guy costumes borrowed directly from a nearby live action role playing game convention (skull shoulder pads? Who even does that?), the whip detail at the pyramids literally cloned from the 10 Commandments, or the priests who dress primarily in bright, shiny colors. This is important, because it implies that the creators noticed that nobody else in the entire movie wore orange, yellow or red.

The lack of convincing, threatening villains is unforgivable. Without a proper challenge for our hero, we end up watching a very long process of boy-gets-girl, with some angry guys dressed like Gwar getting in the way.

Oh, and the ultimate villain is a Caucasian from Atlantis. No, really!

The Plot is generic and mechanical. Slavers kidnap protagonists' girlfriend and various friends, protagonist with posse in pursuit. Beasties attack along the way, and it all culminates in a really big fight. So take the 10 Commandments with Charlton Heston, Apocalypto, Jurassic Park and Conan the Barbarian, put them in a blender for three minutes and slap the big, badly fitting chunks on the screen.

This movie fails to deliver, even on one of the most basic of awful movie promises. The previews for the movie promised an unending gauntlet of prehistoric beasts messily picking off early man on at a time. What we got were 10 minutes total of CGI, and what was shown was either briefly, obscured, or boring. Sabre-tooth tigers had enough screen time to accomplish nothing. Carnivorous proto-ostriches were mostly running around dense jungle undergrowth. There were enough mammoths for any enthusiast, but I'm sure that I'm one of many that came to this movie for something else. Something more. With a movie this awful, they could've given us enough CGI to at least try and confuse us into thinking it's a bad video game instead of a bad movie. Instead, they gave us a bad movie that couldn't even be bothered to sweeten the bitter pill.

Another major failing is a subtle one: English. Unlike recent 'historical dramas' like Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto, 10K BC eschews speaking in a rare dialect. No, they speak perfect English. Strangely, the rest of the tribes of man speak different languages. It was this inconsistency that made me want to chuck a contraband soda at the screen. Whatever factor caused this, be it ineptitude, laziness, or doubts about viewer's intelligence, it still undermined the film.

The quasi mysticism is also worth condemnation. Present throughout the movie mostly through the staple character Old Mother, magic is shown as present, inconsistent and very shaky. Often just vague prophecies and seizing around, it takes up a large amount of screen time. Imagine, strangely large chunks of the movie devoted to someone repeatedly twitching and reading from Strunk and Whites' Book of Cryptic Phrases. It culminates in that most despicable of plot devices, the dues ex machina.

There is not one area of excellence in this movie. In every conceivable way, Emmerich and co. failed. They couldn't cast people who could act, they didn't write a script that deserved to see daylight, they couldn't direct their way to a free strip of bacon and generally shows that Hollywood doesn't have a foolproof method for quality testing.

Troy Doney, Fort Belknap Assiniboine, attended the University of Montana in Missoula and is a graduate of the Freedom Forum's American Indian Journalism Institute. Last summer, Doney interned as a copy editor at the St. Cloud (Minn.) Times.