On Sat­ur­day, I went to the the­ater with my girl­friend and we watched 10,000 B.C. With almost $36 mil­lion 10,000 B.C. didn’t do too bad at the box office on the open­ing week­end. Of course, the movie has been hyped since the first trailer came out. I didn’t have any expec­ta­tions and still I was very dis­ap­pointed. I promise that this isn’t a small feat – that’s usu­ally not eas­ily achieved. Now, let’s get on with this sorry excuse of a movie. Be warned, there are mas­sive spoil­ers ahead!

The trailer promised a lot of action and quite a spec­ta­cle. Unfor­tu­nately, the movie com­pletely failed to deliver. One of the first things I noticed was the unnat­ural white teeth of the peo­ple sup­posed to live a whop­ping 10,000 years before Christ. Quite obvi­ously the old mys­tic did a good job in tak­ing care for her peo­ple, includ­ing den­tal ser­vice on a highly sophis­ti­cated level. Of course, the old woman also hap­pens to have some abil­i­ties like pre­cog­ni­tion, farsee­ing and stuff like that. That was to be expected.

Let’s get to our hero, D’Leh, who was quite a sucker. When his betrothed Evo­let is cap­tured and enslaved by peo­ple way more advanced than our pseudo-​​Neanderthalers, he has to fol­low the “demons” to get her back. (Did you notice that I wrote “way more advanced”? D’Leh’s peo­ple are depicted as hunters liv­ing in the Stone Age, hunt­ing mam­moths. The slavers look like they came rid­den right out of medieval times, hav­ing tamed horses and steel(!) weapons.) Our hero and three of his peo­ple start out to retrieve Evo­let and the other cap­tives. They fol­low the slavers over the moun­tains through a short strip of des­o­late steppes into some kind of tropic jun­gle, all within a few weeks. OK, time to for­get about plau­si­bil­ity here.

In the jun­gle, the wannabe-​​rescuers almost lose the old and expe­ri­enced war­rior Tic’Tic to some kind of gigan­tic, car­niv­o­rous Ostrich. One of these beasts gets killed by our hero in a wood of bam­boo that hap­pens to grow quite iso­lated in this jun­gle. Any­way, the hero con­tin­ues and soon he res­cues a sabre-​​tooth-​​tiger who will then help him later on. Ah well, what a story. But we’re not fin­ished yet. They raise a lot of desert natives and wan­der through the desert, obvi­ously headed north, only to arrive at a place where pyra­mids are built. With the help of slaves, of course.

The vet­eran movie goer knows that our hero is bound to raise a rebel­lion among the cap­tives, which of course suc­ceeds, and destroy the pow­ers that be. By the way, as the rebel­lion unfolds, we will see the very gay look­ing priests and a study of the high priest. Guess what’s there on the table. A map of the world that although rough was quite accu­rate in depict­ing con­ti­nents, islands and so on. Seri­ously! What the fuck? Do not ask which fuck.

CGI is pretty good and looks con­vinc­ing. Unfor­tu­nately, that only applies to the mam­moths. The sabre-​​toothed cat ani­mal thingie cer­tainly doesn’t look real enough. At least the land­scapes look nice. Cut me some slack here, but that’s all the good that comes with that par­tic­u­lar movie. The story is dubi­ous at best and the act­ing is almost nonex­is­tent. There’s almost no action and if there is the film relies on sweep­ing aer­ial images that only serve to detach the viewer from the real action. I didn’t want his­tor­i­cal accu­racy but what they served was too big to swal­low. I mean, just about a few weeks to walk from some­thing resem­bling the tun­dra through a jun­gle and half a desert only to arrive at some place where all bow to the Almighty One and build pyra­mids? That just sucks. Big time.