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Time warped

Another primal trek into heroland
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
March 12th, 2008 issue

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Not many moons have passed since we wandered through the jungles and savannahs of Campbelland on a hero’s quest with Mel Gibson. His sanguine Mayan epic, Apocalypto, played fast with historical facts, though one could still find great craft at work in the middle of the director’s touching salute to human slaughter. We are now confronted with Roland Emmerich’s 10,000 B.C., a bit of Mesolithic hokum that in many ways seems like a children’s matinee version of Apocalypto. The verities of history have again been clubbed out of the way by the screenwriters. But, unlike Gibson’s film, there is little in the way of artistry evident.
Gibson’s worldview is a thing best left for psychologists to grapple with, though his demons are nevertheless arresting from a safe distance. Emmerich is less complex and, therefore, less of an artist. He only suffers to tell a good yarn, while we can only suffer in its telling.
Perhaps that’s unfair. 10,000 B.C. is innocent, if derivative, nonsense and, unlike the vacuous Jumper, offers its audience a classically structured hero’s journey with a beginning, middle and end. It’s all prodded along by the disembodied voice of Omar Sharif, whose primary task is to keep track of our hero’s lineage, the yarn-tangle of his tribe’s prophecies, and the moons that must pass before various plot devices can be fulfilled. Still, Apocalypto did it so much better.
A tribe of woolly mammoth hunters take in an orphaned girl from a recently vanquished people. The parish shaman, Old Mother, recognizes the girl, Evolet, as the missing puzzle part to one of the elders’ prophecies, and foresees the beginning of the end of her people’s way of life. Evolet, through her future co-habitation with one of the tribe’s huntsmen, will be the catalyst for a great change that will come to involve corn seeds.
Many more moons will pass before Emmerich finally seeds this corn with some CGI adventures involving the woolly mammoths, whose arrival coincides with the rise of tribal stud D’Leh (Steven Strait), a proud, young homo sapien with an eye for the nubile Evolet (Camilla Belle). Having single-handedly felled a mammoth pack’s bull, D’Leh becomes the bearer of the white spear, his tribe’s greatest trophy.
Sadly, the mammoth bone-gnawing party that follows is rudely interrupted by four-legged demons — in reality, men riding the hitherto unknown horse. They pack Evolet and others off into slavery, leaving D’Leh and his surviving friends to set off to rescue her.
What follows is pretty much the primitive road trip mapped by Gibson, with terror birds (the quite-extinct phorusrhacids) and the odd saber-tooth tiger thrown in for atmosphere. Yet it likewise ends in a brutal city of pyramids, where Evolet and the others must toil for a race of bald, bejeweled priests.
Pyramids with carnivorous emus is squeezing history to a concertina, but Emmerich is no more a student of history than he was of science in The Day After Tomorrow. D’Leh will arrive in this Pharaonic neighborhood of the early Holocene with hundreds of fellow warriors, having befriended chief Nakudu (Joel Virgel from that other great cinematic history lesson, The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas).
Prophecy will become fact, and the world will soon be made a safer place for agriculture.
Emmerich gives us plenty of fighting, though, unlike Gibson’s blood-lettings, it’s rather tame, if not timid, stuff. A few spear-pierced torsos here and there, but not many dousings from the slops bucket.
A lesson Emmerich didn’t learn from Gibson is how to handle dialogue. For Apocalypto and his S&M Christ epic, Gibson chose to tell his tales in native Yucatec and Aramaic, respectively. In 10,000 B.C., Emmerich has sadly opted for MSE (Modern Stilted English), a language bereft of adjectives and contractions, which is best pronounced declaratively, and which archaic peoples have been speaking on Hollywood back lots for many moons. One misses the fervent grunts of Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C.
The acting is appropriately wooden, if not petrified, though the unintentional humor of the lines, as well as the earnestness with which they are expressed, is one of the film’s primary selling points. Here at last is a film so bad that it’s almost good. Almost.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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