10,000 BC - Eh.

I saw this movie on opening night 3/7, after a Tivo preview piqued my appetite for fantasy drama. Any story set in the past gets an automatic mulligan from me; I’ll save the hows and whys of that for another post but for now suffice to say that 10,000 BC had a pretty easy sell with this viewer. Note if you haven’t guessed by now this is a definite SPOILER so stop here if you’re planning to see this.

It started off so-so; you had a tribe of dreadlock wearing mammoth hunters, with the (obligatory) black sheep D’Leh as the protagonist and the blue eyed foreigner Evolet as the love interest (a bit of borrowing there from Clan of the Cave Bear, but no big deal), and some basic caveman interaction overlaid with some mystical mumbo-jumbo from the tribe’s witch doctor.

As far as looks go, the dreads were okay – but I wasn’t thrilled with the neatly clipped mustaches and goatees; if you just took out the face paint these guys would have fit right in nowadays like a bunch of Gen Y Bohemians on the way to a rave. So, Hollywood strikes early. Meh.

Then along comes a band of horse riding, bronze(?) using slavers who capture most of the tribe and start marching them back into the great Beyond whence they came. D’Leh, his rival Ka’Ren, a boy named Baku and the tribe’s leader TicTic set off in pursuit, having been among the few to avoid capture, which takes them on a journey far beyond their accustomed homeland and incidentally following the footsteps of D’Leh’s long departed father.

Now the idea that the tribe’s chieftain/top warrior/etc TicTic would have simply been “missed” is a bit of a stretch to me; I’d expect slavers would normally take a few minutes to scope out a village before attacking it, and leave no hut un-checked. After all, every villager is cash in their wallet at the marketplace.

It would have been more believable as well as more interesting to me if D’Leh’s little group were initially captured along with the rest of the tribe, but later managed to escape and then tail the slave caravan.

But whatever. The early part of the trip down south was pretty cool, enlivened by the appearance of terror birds – giant flightless avians (Phorusrhacids according to wiki) that harrassed the slavers and would-be rescuers with enough horrific panache to do proud the raptors in Jurassic Park.

That was actually the high point of the movie for me; events happened quickly with a natural flow, the sense of terror drew me in, and the characters all behaved in a believable manner.

All too quickly, they passed beyond the territory of the giant birds, and the plot returned to its drifting, predictable pace.

Now entering into an area looking like North Africa, the rescuers team up with the warriors of several local villages – all of which apparently having been raided by the slavers not long before – and the resulting angry mob has just about caught up with the slavers when the dastardly villains slip away down a river on a flotilla of sailing ships.

It was only just barely believable that the slavers could hit all of these different villages with their considerable numbers of warriors, and that only with a stretch of faith; yeah they would have attacked by surprise and been aided by their superior mobility and weapons, but still… eh.

And then you have the whole saber-tooth spirit protector thing going on, by way of spooking the remaining Naku villagers into accepting D’Leh as their new leader. It would have been (a lot) more convincing to me if D’Leh’s group caught up with and joined a pre-formed Naku rescue party, where you would have common sense as justification and leave off with the Tarzan-ish prophecy thing.

But I guess someone was determined to find some excuse to shoehorn a friendly saber-tooth tiger in there somewhere, and this was as good a place as any. Honestly if you’re going to get that silly a tribe of pygmies with trained saber-tooth mounts would have been a lot cooler.

So anyways now you have this massive band of warriors all behind D’Leh as he leads them across the desert to the slavers’ final destination, which looks like the work site of a proto-Egyptian pyramid complex, complete with poncy long fingernailed high officials, death cults, soldiers, and of course lots and lots of slaves moving big stones around. There is one tantalizing reference to these people as having originated from a “sunken island”, but there is no elaboration.

Without a great deal of effort, D’Leh and his crew infiltrate the slave population and trigger a revolt (apparently the slave drivers here are unfamliar with the faces and numbers of the slaves on their respective work gangs), centering around the captive mammoths who D’Leh is able to stampede into oncoming soldiers, and culminating in the last stand outside the headquarters of the high priest where the ancient nasty threatens to have Evolet pulled apart by horses.

D’Leh’s solution? Impale the creep with a spear from 60-100 feet away, and grab the girl during the ensuing confusion. Of course. That would have been cool thirty years ago when I saw Conan, but somehow I felt just a bit robbed now; once again the movie sets up a major challenge which is overcome by the vehicle of B movie goofiness.

My version? Have D’Leh lose heart and back off, the enemy (of course) attacks the rebels as they are milling in disarray at the disheartening of their leader, when Baku and a few of D’Leh’s other friends dislodge the gold pyramid head piece to fall down on the crusty cackling fellow (instead of having it fall off uselessly like it did in the movie). More plausible? No, but cooler at least in that you have a bit poetic justice from an unlikely source.

Of course there has to be a rub; like Brutus from Popeye, the head slaver is smitten with Evolet, tries to carry her off on horseback and when that is foiled resorts to putting an arrow in her back just to be spiteful. But happily Evolet is resurrected by the magic of the tribe’s witch doctor from the beginning of the movie (remember her?), so D’Leh has the last laugh, and all is well.

My initial reaction as you may have guessed was mostly negative, but the more I’ve thought about it since, I’ve realized this actually could have worked – broken into a mini-series on the Sci-Fi or Discovery channel, you would have gotten to spend more time with the individual cultures and their idiosyncrasies (including not least of which the background of these presumed refugees from Atlantis), and where character development and plot would be less important.

They could still do something like this although I haven’t heard anything about it and from the kind of rating it’s gotten from critics it’s unlikely to happen.

But we’ll see.