Strangely, it seems the public perception and marketing around 10,000 B.C. believes the film to be an epic fantasy filled with special effects and action galore. Why is this strange? Well, after watching the special features on the Blu -ray edition of the film you would think they set out to make an accurate depiction of some rumored long-lost prehistoric civilization. Graham Hancock, author of “Fingerprints of the Gods”, is included in the accompanying featurette called “Inspiring an Epic”. He proposes his theory that an undocumented civilization has gone completely unaccounted for and was actually those that built the pyramids. There is much more to this idea, but I doubt you want me to go into it, but that isn’t stopping director Roland Emmerich and Hancock from taking this film far more seriously than they ever should.
Of course, if approached with Hancock’s ideals in mind you can’t take shots at the historic timeline because they are putting out there a “prove me wrong” scenario. While they are willing to admit in the featurettes that some of the stuff they feature is all bogus considering the time in which the film is set, they really do seem to think this all could have happened and Hancock even goes so far as to hope it will inspire people to look into the possibility. The funny thing is that while he is doing this we are watching visual effects advisers geek it up while they show us how they made mammoths gallop and saber-tooth tigers become friends with man. It’s all so far out there and convoluted that you can’t respect the film on any level.
It doesn’t work as a drama because the acting is ridiculously bad. This film feels like a prehistoric version of The Village, the only difference being that these guys apparently aren’t faking it even though they so obviously appear to be a bunch of twenty-somethings running around in tattered clothing in between trips to the make-up chair.
It doesn’t work as an action spectacle because watching people hunt mammoths is not exactly awe-inspiring and then when it comes to the saber-tooth tiger it isn’t anything like the box art leads us to believe. In fact, our lead character D’Leh becomes friends with the tiger after saving it from a pit of death. Yay , maybe in the sequel they will make out a little bit. The combination of bad acting and a story that is so watered down it actually could have been rated PG make this a film with absolutely no soul. It’s as if every single person working on the feature had a different idea of the actual film they were making. [ … ]
