10,000 O.C.

Today, I finally saw No Country For Old Men on DVD. That's a wonderful, fascinating movie that deserved its Best Picture Oscar. It also taught me something. Never, ever watch a movie that has the potential to become a timeless classic on the same day that you are planning to go out and see a crappy, mindless, forgettable action film. I probably should have known that already so that's one on me. A movie made by the guys who made Fargo, Blood Simple, and Miller's Crossing really magnifies the flaws of the movie made by the guy who made Independence Day, Stargate and Universal Soldier. Not that I hate 10,000 B.C. director Roland Emmerich, mind you. He occupies a warm place in my heart for the sheer chutzpah he showed in his last movie, The Day After Tomorrow. In that movie, he found not one but two variations on the old "outrunning a fireball" gimmick that you've seen in every movie since Die Hard. First, his characters outran a tidal wave. Later on, they outran a cell of supercooled air that was brought down to Earth by some sort of reverse space tornado or something. Unfortunately, no comparable scene exists in 10,000 B.C.

10,000 B.C. opens in what I suppose is the year 10,010 B.C. when a little girl with blue eyes wanders into a village of mammoth hunters. Despite the fact that the local priestess/shaman/whatever has a vision that she'll grow up to be a major league pain in the ass for the tribe, they accept and raise her as one of their own and name her Evolet. A boy named D'Leh instantly develops a crush on her and vows that he will always be with her, making him the world's first stalker. A few years later, Evolet and D'Leh grow up to be adults who look like models and thus, the world's first superhot power couple is born.

It turns out that the only way D'Leh can make Evolet his woman and spawn super cute babies whose descendants will someday fill the pages of Maxim is for D'Leh to not only participate in a mammoth kill but to actually be the one who kills it. You'd think that a society who live in a mammoth-killing-based economy would be pretty good at it but, if you thought that, you'd be wrong as they proceed to use a "scare the crap out of the mammoths so they run away as fast as their mammoth legs can carry them" strategy of hunting them down. When one manages to stumble into their nets, it promptly breaks free. D'Leh manages to get his hand wrapped up in the net that's tangled around the charging mammoth and lucks into the magical mammoth kill that will make it possible for him to finally be allowed to violate Evolet's nether regions. At this point, I realize that I have neglected to tell you all the D'Leh is a whiny dumbass who throws away his dream of coupling with what is literally the only hot girl on the planet by confessing that the mammoth basically tripped onto his spear. In my view, he still technically met the requirements but, since it would have been inconvenient for the plot for that to be the case, he is stripped of his "Screwing Evolet" privileges.

Anyhoo, all this becomes moot when some slave traders show up and steal several of the mammoth hunters, including Evolet. These are the ones that Old Mother foresaw coming years earlier and you'd think that the hunters would have prepared for their invasion in some way. Again, if you thought this, you'd be 10,000 percent wrong. D'Leh then leads a rescue party to get his chick back and manages to do things like get stalked by carnivorous ostriches and stumble into saber-tooth tiger traps. The meet several other large villages and societies who've also had their people kidnapped by the slave traders which caused me to wonder how, again and again, what were maybe a half dozen slave traders on horseback were managing to defeat one village of hearty hunters armed with the same spears they had after another. Again, this happened because it was convenient for the plot. Eventually they encounter a kingdom of super-smart people who need slaves to build their pyramids (a feat of engineering most likely utterly unknown back in 10,000 B.C. but that's hardly the stupidest thing in the movie so I'll just let it go) and absolutely LOVE to whip those slaves while they're busy trying to work.

In case you couldn't tell, I thought that 10,000 B.C. sucked. It had a dumb plot about dumb people doing dumb things that commits the ultimate sin of a Hollywood action film by not having decent action sequences or special effects to make up for all the dumbness. It does have some unintentionally hilarious scenes like a really bad looking CGI saber tooth tiger, one muttering prophet after another, vaguely homoerotic scenes of loincloth-wearing men hugging and touching foreheads and an alleged living god who dresses like Celine Dion. Even under the principle of, "I'll take what I can get," it's not enough.

IMDB says that Roland Emmerich's next movie is a return to his roots called 2012, another story about large chunks of the planet facing extinction through natural disasters. Hopefully there will be a scene where the heroes have to outrun something like a giant marshmallow and I can have good feelings about Emmerich again.