Special-effects
breakthroughs like CGI come at a price. Once the seemingly impossible has been
realized, it tends to lose its wonder. There's another danger as well: Once the
price tag of those breakthroughs drops a little, they can end up in the wrong
hands. Specifically, Roland Emmerich's hands.
With his former partner
Dean Devlin and now on his own, Emmerich has blazed a path of big-budget
mediocrity that stretches from Stargate to Independence Day to Godzilla and beyond. Viewers get
adequate, derivative special effects, crepe-thin characters, and stories that
never escape the shadows of their bigger-than-big premises. 10,000 B.C. is Emmerich's first
directorial outing since 2004's The Day After Tomorrow, and it does little but
swap the end of civilization with this beginning. Viewers get a few moments of
screen-filling effects, some angry CGI animals, and a whole lot of walking
around.
A never-more-serious Omar
Sharif narrates the story of a hardworking tribe of mammoth-hunters and the
young man (Steven Strait) destined to save them from doom at the hands of
"four-legged demons." These, disappointingly, turn out to be armed men on
horseback, but 10,000 B.C. does have its share of fantastical prehistoric
creatures in the form of mammoths, saber-toothed cats, and giant birds that
behave just like Jurassic's raptors. Maybe, like Emmerich, they've seen
that movie a few too many times, too.
Strait is forced to leave
the comforts of his tribe when the four-legged demons kidnap his Lindsay
Lohan-like girlfriend (Camilla Belle). He embarks on an epic journey that takes
him across frost-covered plains, the jungles of Africa, and the desert,
environments that apparently exist within a few days' march of each other.
Along the way, he forges an alliance with some African friends, fights animals,
and from all appearances, develops feet impervious to sores as he tramps along.
There are home movies of toddlers that place less emphasis on walking.
The Day After Tomorrow was kind of stupidly fun,
and 10,000 B.C.
might be too, if it weren't so stupidly dull. And when the dullness stops, the
film still has problems. Emmerich knows how to fill the screen with spectacle,
but not how to field-marshal it. Stampeding mammoths and flying spears play
more like visual clutter than the wonders of a lost era brought back to life.
He summons up a dead world, only to kill it again, one pixel at a time.