A Mammoth Flop
10,000 B.C. produces unintentional laughter

One of my current favorite viral videos is called “Star Wars According to a Three-Year-Old.” In it, a little girl takes about 90 seconds to summarize the entire story of “Princess Leia, R2 and the shiny guy,” and then warns, “Don’t talk back to Darth Vader, ’cause he’ll get you!”

I wish this same little girl could have summarized the new film 10,000 B.C. for me. It would have been easy for her to touch on all the important points of the film in a minute-and-a-half and it would have saved me eight bucks and two hours of time.

More than anything else, 10,000 B.C. reminded me of those cheap sci-fi features of the late ’60s and early ’70s. In those days, whenever producers needed a low-cost alternative to creating realistic cavemen, zombies or Apaches, they would cast the nearest long-haired hippies they could find. It didn’t really matter if these extras lacked any acting skills whatsoever, they just had to look the part without straining the film’s hair and makeup budget.

Such it is with 10,000 B.C., starring a bunch of muddy dread-heads who look like they fell out of the van after a rainy weekend at the Bonnaroo Music Festival. A group of about 30 of these people live in a village on top of a snowy mountain, far from any reliable source of food or water. Evidently, they survive by attacking the hordes of mammoths that may or may not migrate near them each year. These mammoths are more than twice the size of anything in the fossil record, but young men from the village routinely kill the biggest bull of the herd with pointy wooden sticks.

When about half of the village is captured by marauding slave traders, four men of the village take on the task of following their trail in an attempt to free their friends and family. Despite the fact that these men are on foot, they quickly descend from their cold mountain wilderness into a tropical jungle and then across a desert. It’s as if they have traversed from Mount Kilimanjaro to the mouth of the Nile River in a matter of days. During that time they meet tribes of all races and battle ten-foot tall birds and saber-toothed tigers the size of SUVs.

The movie’s big climax is at the site of some Egyptian pyramids where the villagers attempt to disrupt the construction process by instigating a slave rebellion. Without getting into all of the logistical fallacies of what was really going on with pre-civilization man (and animals) 12,000 years ago, let’s just say that 10,000 B.C. lacks that big moment or character that allows the viewer to suspend his or her disbelief. The dialogue is a combination of the Queen’s English and hesitant grunts, so that part of the film fails the believability test also.

On the plus side, if you see this movie with plenty of people in the theatre, there are many moments of unintended hilarity. The laughter becomes quite contagious if you lighten up and go with the flow.

The biggest problem with 10,000 B.C. is that inevitably it will be compared to Apocalypto, a much superior movie with a similar plot. Apocalypto had the misfortune of being released not long after its creator and director Mel Gibson had his drunken anti-Semitic meltdown. It was also his first film after the bombastic and overly violent The Passion of the Christ. Consequently, Apocalypto struggled at the box office and found an enthusiastic audience through word of mouth only after its DVD release. With so many movie lovers just now seeing the wonders of Apocalypto, it is only natural for them to use it as a measuring stick for another film about primitive people, the slave trade, human sacrifice, separated young lovers, deadly animals and pyramids (Is it just me or is 10,000 B.C. beginning to look like a copycat?).

In conclusion, if you have yet to see Apocalypto, rent it instead of going to see 10,000 B.C. If you’ve already seen Apocalypto, see 10,000 B.C. and get ready for some good laughs.

10,000 B.C. is rated PG-13 for some violence. It is currently playing at Regal Cinemas in Boone.