Not that bad!
I have to be honest, I was really dreading this film after some of the reviews I have read. My opinion is that OK, this film had a fairly flimsy story with no real depth, but as a fantasy adventure film it did an OK job. Granted it will never be a classic, but the effects were quite good, fairytale story... little people v big bad guys..... so all in all, probably never watch it again, but it was a alright Sunday afternoon no brainer of a movie.

woo hoo!
...after 6 years constant research ive found a new worse film ever....a plotline so thin it could be posh's waistline, characters so flat they could all have been run over by a tank....and when they had mammoths building the pyramids i kind of mentally gave up...all this with a nasty little undertone of racism.....
ive already fogotten the ending, but im sure it was 'happy'...

it's Atlantis
All those "historical incongruities" suddenly make sense when you pause the DVD at the point when there is a map of the known world lying on the table at the palace of the god-like king about two-thirds into the movie. The shot is a very quick one and maybe Roland Emmerich wanted cinema-goers to register the map on a mere subconscious level.

Yet once the film is paused you can see a map showing the familiar outlines of Africa, Europe , the Middle East and ... South America! In the Atlantic Ocean (according to Plato "outside the columns of Heracles" meaning Gibraltar) the map shows a bigger island to which all the lines are pointing. Atlantis, the legendary civilisation whose hybris led to its downfall at the end of the ice age.

The movie is Roland Emmerich's take on Atlantis - a people highly advanced in comparison with stone age modern man: hence the horses, the boats, the use of metals in weapons and monuments, the building of pyramids in 10,000 BC, which would later on re-occur on both sides of the Atlantic in Mayan/Aztec culture and Egypt, hence the domestication of now extinct animals. Roland is just playing with possibilities and that makes for great family entertainment. Danke!


The woolly mammoths are fun!
10,000 BC [2008]

Appears to be a studio bound green screen shoot with some adequate CGI, the woolly mammoths are fun, but the sabre tooth tiger on steroids is a disaster.

OH yes, the story, well just a hunt over snow filled plains and deserts to rescue villagers captured by slavers, acting adequate unto the limitation of the film.

Placing the building of the first pyramids at 10,000BCE is not perceived wisdom but does accord with some alternative theories placing there building by an advanced civilisation that was annihilated by the ice age in 10,500BCE.

Not even worth renting.


WATCHABLE
Coming off some rather poor reviews, I expected failure from this movie, and the first ten minutes delivered all the fail I anticipated. After that, it drastically improved, and while it didn't succeed as an epic, it was very lively and highly imaginative.

Starting with the bad, most of the dialogue just plain sucks. It's great that they tried to make the people sound simple, being this is 10,000 BC, but the kids (D'leh and Evolet) had these really painfully Arab-esquire accents and awkward dialogue reminiscent of Attack of the Clones Padme and Anakin. The dumb little kid who follows the hunters also is an embarrassing addition, but thankfully his dialogue is limited.

The minor characters, such as the English-speaking African chief, are the only characters who really shine with their simplistic dialogue, and even D'leh sometimes narrowly misses having his lines crumble to sheer stupidity.

Also a major detractment is the narrator, who is mostly completely un-needed save to further some events. Other times, we really don't need to hear him, such as the very end when the Old Mother supposedly 'breathes life' into Evolet. The images showed this clearly enough without needless narration.

In the beginning, the special effects are rather poor, as you can very clearly see that a character doesn't fit in the background environment, as if they were filmed in front of a green screen, and then attempts at digitally removing the green glare only smeared the picture.

Also, it was clearly not necessary to have the ice people of D'leh speak English, as they are the only English-speaking tribe in the movie, and it would have far better served the atmosphere to have them speaking a more primitive language, with more hand and facial gestures than verbosity.

The action sequences, costumes, cinematography, and sets were spectacular, and managed to tell the greater story (oppressed tribes banding together to overthrow a tyrant) in a way that far supersedes the main individual story of D'leh trying to save Evolet, though from the prophetic viewpoint, it was interesting how they twisted the two together, having it be that only D'leh's desire to save Evolet could make him lead the tribes to freedom. To sum, the movie succeeds in macro-storytelling, but fails in micro-storytelling.

As for the historical accuracy... it's very imaginative. And it requires you to use your imagination to explain certain things.

For one, the pyramids in what is clearly Egypt. I thought it was a great explanation to show them using Mammoths to pull their limestone (since even today historians are marveled at how they could have pulled such stones with manpower alone), and though the first pyramids were built some 7,000 years after this movie takes place, the movie makes sure that it is left open to interpretation.

What? The pyramids are barely half-way completed in the movie, and the slaves and tribes revolt against their ruler (a tall, godlike figure who must maintain his illusion of divinity to a point of never being seen; his personal slaves are all blind), leaving the pyramids incomplete. You could easily imagine that the pyramids could left incomplete for thousands of years, before a civilization known to us as the Egyptians of hieroglyphs and mummies worked to complete them. Sands could have eroded the pyramids, covering them up completely, or who knows? The movie doesn't definitively say the pyramids were built in 10,000 BC: only that they were begun, and presumably not completed by the original builders.

In all, it's a beautifully done movie, which suffers from poor micro-storytelling. If the total story were in the forefront, and the love story reduced to a subplot, I think it would have been a far better movie.

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