Sense of wonder all but leached from '10,000 BC'</p>
Sad, but true: We've almost entirely lost our sense of wonder when it comes to movies. Few who currently write about the liveliest art are old enough to recall what magical worlds small-town theaters once promised, for the price of your allowance or the heady risk of sneaking in via an unguarded exit door.
Sans CGI, Flash Gordon serials and fasten-yourseatbelt excursions into lands that time forgot goosed our imaginations, not only in the dark of the theater but later, in our fertile dreams. Movies were truly dream machines, transporting us into times and places and personalities otherwise beyond our ken. You felt in your very flesh and bones the delicious danger of upping anchor and sailing off into terra incognita.
I ran away from home to see Cooper and Schoedsack's "King Kong," a movie forbidden to me for reasons I didn't then understand. That night the projector was nothing less than a time machine, beaming me back into an exotic world where a noble ape ruled, battling prehistoric monsters for love of a girl the size of his thumb. I wept as the beast, torn out of his natural setting, became a pathetic show for petty people - and then died for beauty's sake. Those dim, black-and-white images marked my psyche forever, though a lot of time passed before I could articulate my monster movie as a potent allegory about nature and civilization, love and libido, art and entertainment.
Director Roland Emmerich's track record pretty much guaranteed that "10,000 BC," his new $150- million prehistoric fantasy, wasn't going to deliver anything like "King Kong"'s resonant storytelling, visual magic or iconographic acting. Still, the movieloving kid in me - yes, yes, she's still kickin' - hoped to hitch another ride in the cinematic time machine, to visit a lost world and time.
No such luck. This relentlessly pedestrian adventure exemplifies the kind of charmless, illiterate filmmaking that mars so many fantastic journeys in contemporary movies.
"Independence Day" and "Day after Tomorrow," previous F/X-heavy Emmerich outings, were juiced by end-of-the-world terrors, delivered by murderous aliens and radical climate change. "10,000 BC" lays on prophecy and legend (courtesy of Omar Sharif's charged narration) to dramatize an evolutionary turning point in human history: post-Ice Age, when big game, like mammoths, begin to disappear and hunting must give way to farming. For a small mountain tribe, that crucial transition depends on the outcome of a hero's journey.
In accordance with Joseph Campbell's familiar recipe, D'Leh (Stephen Strait) is an outcast, the "coward" son of a man who long ago deserted his high-mountain tribe. Still, when a blue-eyed girlchild (Camille Belle), only survivor of a lowland massacre, is marked by tribal sachem Old Mother as key to the clan's future, D'Leh cannot help bonding with Evolet for life. But our hero botches a longanticipated mammoth hunt, losing both girl and totemic leadership. No matter: Slavers on horseback swoop in to carry off almost everyone, especially Evolet, and D'Leh's mythic journey - from snowy peaks down into steamy jungle and finally to desert and the head of the Nile - begins.
If only "10,000 BC" were the kind of magical time machine that could make you feel you've really been deposited out on the cold spine of a long-past world, where Stone Age creatures not yet like you hunker down inside dim, warm huts, shelters fashioned from hide and huge tusks, the "teeth" of the huge, hairy juggernauts these men hunt, yet revere as part of a natural, interdependent cycle of life. How might these early men and women speak, move, interact? Would the ambient sound of this place and time be alien or familiar?
But Emmerich and company leach all strangeness and glamour out of this prehistoric panorama, evoking the lifeless tableaux in a museum of natural history. Just smear some mud on a bunch of multiethnic faces (that soon falls by the wayside - the stars get cleaner as the film progresses), coif the gang in dreadlocks and make them talk with that weird formality and pseudo-portentousness that characterizes dialogue in bad Biblical epics. That's verisimilitude, hack-style.
Aside from the elder TikTik (Australian actor Cliff Curtis, whose always-interesting face shows his Maori heritage), no one stands out in this homogeneous band. Even D'Leh and Evolet, the film's Neolithic Adam and Eve, are pretty vapid, just another attractive duo hooking up in "Survivor: 10,000 BC." But I can't deny that the CGI'd mammoths stampeding across a bleak steppe conjure minor-league grandeur, as does the super-sized saber-tooth tiger D'Leh, aping Androcles, rescues. But the ravenous Big Birds - combo of chicken, ostrich and parrot - that slingshot through the jungle like demented roadrunners are unworthy descendents of "Jurassic Park" velociraptors.
D'Leh's quest leads him into Multicultural Land, to discover unfamiliar tribes - black hunters, warriors, riverfolk, pygmies, seed-growers - who live in harmony with nature but are being decimated by the ruthless raiders. Easy as pie, an army gathers and sets off to find the "head of the snake," ancientspeak for the source of the Nile.
Confronted by a truly spectacular building project - gold-tipped pyramid amid monumental shrines and outbuildings - serviced by thousands of slaves and brutalized mammoths, not the slightest sense of awe or surprise is evinced by our primitives. Wouldn't a Neanderthal suffer just a little culture shock at the sleazy splendor of, say, Vegas? Nope, 7,000 years before the first pyramids were raised, D'Leh and his Stone Age posse are way too cool to wig out at anachronisms such as sailing ships, domesticated animals, sophisticated metal- and stonework. They are Spartacus, rebelling against Rome ... er, Egypt before it was Egypt?
Turns out all this corrupting artifice - you can call it progress, if you like - is the fruit of a Bad Seed, a stranded E.T. who can't get home (see Emmerich's 1984 "Stargate" for backstory). That's always been an intriguing theory - aliens jump-starting human evolution - but in "10,000 BC" the origins of the "god," mumbled by someone in passing, seem to be of scant interest to anybody. It's all about dull D'Leh, his eternally expressionless girlfriend Evolet - and, oh yes, the handful of seeds that someone finally remembers to plant, post-quest.
The best kind of "once upon a time" stories unfold organically, each event evolving inevitably and naturally into the next, finally revealing the signifi- cance that was always there. "10,000 BC"'s narrative hitches its way along like an arthritic zombie hoping to dead-end somewhere soon. Comprised mostly of stitched-together parts from "Apocalypto," "The Ten Commandments," "Quest for Fire," "One Million Years BC" and a host of other myth-sized epics, Emmerich's folly is so fl accid it doesn't even rise to the level of guilty pleasure.
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