10,000 B.C.
Posted by J on September 6, 2008
10,000 B.C. is special. It possesses that unique quality found in so many great leaders and negotiators: it 
makes people look past their differences and, for at least a 90-minute period, unite. Some of you, we know, think there never was a 10,000 B.C. Some of you think there was. Rest assured, even though you all have serious disagreements, all of you will laugh at 10,000 B.C.
This is not because 10,000 B.C. is a comedy. It’s not really much of an unintentional comedy. But for this movie to pass itself off as something historical is hilarious. Consider our heroes, the mountain-based hunters of the mammoth. These guys have a special hunting technique sure to lose the kill every time. One of them sneaks into the middle of the mammoth pack, then stands up and howls like a banshee. When the mammoths stampede, he tries to avoid getting trampled, while his fellow hunters raise their arms and howl like banshees. The mammoths run away. Without attempting to first kill the mammoths, the hunters run after them, losing ground because they are slower, but thanks to the miracle of movies they keep pace. Finally, the hunters flush one of the mammoths into a net. In fact, the whole point of this hunting charade is to catch a mammoth in a net, which contains the beast for no more than two minutes.
With hunters like these, it’s a wonder that humanity made it past 10,000 B.C. at all.
We follow the story of these hunters, whose tribe gets sacked by a few barbarians on horses. A blue-eyed female is abducted from the tribe, so a young mammoth-hunter named D’Leh goes after her. D’Leh pursues the barbarians, who have pllaged the local area like a pack of IRS agents. Since you know what happens when a prince pursues a princess, you understand that he must go to a fortress and rescue her from a king, etc.
The curious thing about 10,000 B.C. is the multicultural angle. Somehow, the mammoth hunters are composed of Caucasians, Maoris, Africans, and American Indians. When D’Leh pursues his princess, he picks up a bunch of guys to help him, most of whom are Africans living in jungle-based, African-only tribes. They all go to the Emerald City, where a priest caste of Asian Indians are building a Tower-of-Babel-like edifice. It turns out that the bad guys are racially mixed, just like the mammoth hunters, but not like the several African tribes. We tried to look on the world map, to see where all of this action could’ve taken place, but we gave up pretty quickly.
This movie has more in common with the Disneyland ride It’s a Small World than you’d think.
It doesn’t matter whether this movie takes place in 10,000 B.C. or 10,000 A.D. It doesn’t matter whether it takes place on this planet or another. It just takes place. You know what you are getting when the DVD opens with three advertisements for video games. And no, you are not getting an accurate depiction of life in 1,000 B.C.
Unless you think man-eating ostriches recently roamed the earth.
Entertainment: 4
Intelligence: 0
Morality: 5
