10,000 BC

10,000 BULLCRAP
(In the Name of Palagpatism)
By Reymundo Salao

The story of 10,000 BC revolves around the young man (I think his name is Delay) from a caveman tribe that hunts wooly mammoths, and the girl who is prophesized to change the lives of their tribe (I think her name is Everlate). And so the tribe was, one night, raided and pillaged by some strange warriors, they kidnapped some men and women of the tribe (If you’ve seen Apocalypto or Conan the Barbarian, you know what I mean). Delay, the elder hero, and a minor character journey to track down the whereabouts of their kidnapped fellow tribe members and plan on how to defeat their captors. The prisoners are taken into what seems like a more CGI-richer version of the Apocalypto set where they were going to be slaves for some god figure who demands that pyramids should be made. After impressing a neighboring tribe of warriors that he could speak to a sabertooth tiger (who seems to clarify to Delay that their debts are settled even), Delay becomes a leader of an uprising that will plan to topple what seems like a well-established civilization already. So after the obligatory speech before a tribe that doesn’t really understand his language, Delay leads them into a combat that will take only one morning. But how will the battle be won, if Delay is more concerned by Everlate, than he is concerned for the lives of the entire tribe and the other tribes that put him in charge as leader?


Ever since the US remake of “Godzilla” up until the borefest “Day After Tomorrow”, Roland Emmerich’s big budgeted films have been getting duller and duller, and dumber. Now Emmerich marks a new milestone in dumb films with his new idiotic masterpiece. 10k BC was like the commercialized version of Apocalypto. But where Apocalypto seemed to have consistency with historical and anthropological basis, 10k BC was just based on some ignorant perception of what has occurred in 10,000 BC or what could have been possible to have happened around that time. The title presents itself in a documentary kind of way. If they titled it something like Tribal King, it would have been more forgiving for it to be presented as fiction. But the title itself 10,000 BC has an encyclopedia Britannica impression, this tends to make the dumb dumber.
10K BC is sheer fantastic idiocy. Who would’ve thought that there were telescopes during this caveman era? Who would’ve thought there were large sailships already? The movie tends to make its own shallow interpretation of history.

Some of you might complain, "Why should it be consistent with history and reality? It’s just a movie..!" well true, but the title is misleading people into thinking that this movie is based on something which happened or which could possibly have happened around that timeline. The next thing you know, some misinformed (or possibly just stupid) teacher would tell his/her students to watch this movie as an educational material (just like our high school teacher who had "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" shown as an educational film showing, when in actuality, this is just a commercialized, Hollywood version which was severely altered so that it would satisfy some dumb producer, a version that is very very different from what is scholastically the proper storyline of this piece of literature. Suspiciously, that teacher of ours perhaps just wanted to watch that movie in the big screen of our AV room. There was nothing ""educational" about that movie).


Both the dialogue and the acting are devoid of any form of charisma. When the hero-leader makes his obligatory pre-battle speech, you feel as if you're one of the warriors rolling his eyeballs in boredom and doubt, uninspired and intending to survive the battle without lifting a spear. This is a movie where people in the prehistoric era look like supermodels. Camila Belle, who plays the female lead is a walking eye candy herself, looking deliciously pretty even though mud is smeared all over her face. Everybody seems to have evolved from cro-magnon phase overnight and instantly became beautiful and handsome crossbreeds.

If you want to watch this movie for a good laugh at how idiotically outrageous it is, then do so, and you will see a sabertooth tiger who repays gratitude, a caveman who wields a spear which is also a sword (just like something Batman could’ve made, definitely not the kind a caveman could make), the lamest human sacrifice made for a god, and an inexplicably miraculously ridiculous ending. Honestly, I believe it would have made more sense if the villains were revealed to have been space aliens. I mean if they were to have already made something far-out and stupid, at least they should have done it all the way.


People rushed to this movie hoping it was going to be like Snyder and Miller’s “300” Suspiciously, even the numerical title seem to have been chosen so that it can cash in on the fame of 300. Well no, this was never like 300; this was more like just an expensive piece of Palagpatism. I could not have chosen a word more precise to the point than that.