10,000 B.C. MOVIE REVIEW

BC' is a terribly outdated way to classify periods of time, it was replaced by BCE, to denote "before common era" and AD was replaced by CE (meaning "common era"), these changes were made specifically to remove religious references, and Jesus and science are simply incompatible. None of this phased Roland Emmerich, with his latest film, '10,000 BC', which could best be described as a lame re-imagining of Mel Gibson's Apocalypto. It covers much of the same ground, but is set much further in the past, and does not quite pay as much attention to authenticity. Take, for instance, the fact that out of the tribes of cavemen we see here, some speak English and some don't. The special effects are not even that impressive, despite the large budget. The Mammoths and Sabertooth Tigers were actually rendered much more convincingly in Ice Age with computer animation. I half expected to see dinosaurs lumbering about, even though they had been extinct for millions of years; that is one detail Emmerich got right. Humans were still in the early stages of evolution, up against hostile environments and more imposing mammalian creatures that outweighed them by several tons. The mammoth, for its parts, was pretty much harmless, unless you make them mad, like a furry elephant really. The main character, D'Leh (Steven Strait) hunts mammoths, and tries to deal with the stigma of being the child of a coward, since his father left the tribe when he was a boy. D'Leh will eventually emerge as the leader of his tribe, its strongest warrior, but he will have to overcome the trial of rescuing his love, Evolet (Camilla Belle), from those who have taken her, as both slave and sacrifice, which will of course prove his worth, and show his willingness to avenge the tribe after its village has been attacked and plundered. There are some battle sequences, the best one probably with the Sabertooth, but there also groups of human enemies to beat up, as well, slice and dice perhaps, but the camera constantly cuts away so as to safeguard the PG-13 rating by not showing much in the way of gore. A few severed limbs here and there would not have been so bad. The movie runs out of steam rather early, becomes long-winded and tedious, largely because it takes itself a bit too seriously and does not contain enough action. The romantic aspects of the story are not explored too deeply, and we can all be grateful for that. Strait provides a superficial and forgettable hero, but he does display his chest a lot, which may be a plus. Some of the buildings here look like they were inspired by Mayan and Egyptian architecture, which is strange, but then temples are always more elaborate than anything else in ancient civilizations. The cinematography does have its moments, accentuating the natural beauty of the various settings, which include deserts and rain forests, habitats that are not usually that close together, so I wonder where exactly these events are supposed to have occurred. SOURCE OF THIS STORY