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10,000 B.C.

Steven Strait, Camilla Belle

            In an era before the Internet, when the production codes were in place and public nudity was rare, jungle and caveman pictures served a purpose.  These pictures were popular, not because of the action and adventure found within, but rather, males got to see hot chicks in various stages of undress.  The studios could cover themselves with the thin veil of respectability by justifying the female’s wardrobe as just the results of the location and time period.  No one is going to be running around the hot jungle in a full evening gown.  “We are not purposely showing Maureen O’Sullivan’s gams.  Come on, this is what plot calls for.” While Tarzan might be in a life and death struggle with a lion, Jane was always bending over and enjoying a swim, much to the delight of teenage boys who then got to run home and do what teenage boys do like a monkey clicking the pleasure switch to get their food pellet. They were basically the J.C. Penny’s catalog bra and panty section of cinema. (Anyone who grew up before the internet will get this reference.) Everyone understood the wink, wink, nudge, nudge, purpose of these productions. Caveman flicks worked along the same lines, but they were even better because you could cast the hottest chicks in Hollywood; and it did not matter if they could act or not or even if they spoke English.  Dress her in as little fur and leather as possible, smear a little mud and dirt on her and she is a cavewoman.  Wooden performances could be played off as she was just playing primitive, and if she was truly awful, all she had to do was grunt and point a lot.  The studio executive got to show that the casting couch really works.  Theaters got around the rules to show the “t and a” they were not normally allowed to show. Boys got the eye candy they longed for. Women were reminded that they were second-class citizens. Everybody wins.

            With the Internet and the thousands of coeds willing to show their mommy parts for free, I thought the caveman flick had vanished.  No more Sophia Loren in a fur-lined bikini in One Million Years B.C.  No more Shelly Long and Barbara Bach prancing around in almost nothing in Ringo Starr’s Caveman.  No more Daryl Hannah looking all yummy in Clan of The Cave Bear. When they are giving away muffins for free, it is kind of hard to charge for stale bread. Yet, writer and director Roland Emmerich proved me wrong.  The hot chick cavewoman picture is back, and it is dumber than ever. 

            If you have ever seen one of Roland Emmerich’s films, you pretty much know what you are going to get.  You are going to watch millions of dollars being thrown on the screen in overblown action sequences with almost no common sense. Most of his scripts you would almost suspect were written in crayon by a third grader. The motivations and personality of the characters are paper thin, and the action sequences are so over the top and fast paced that you do not have time to think how stupid the plot is.      Sometimes they work like Independence Day and Stargate.  Most of the time they are painful experiences like Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow, and Patriot.  Now he is bringing his stupidity to where it has never been before, back to 10,000 B.C., a project that the director has been trying to get made over the last few years and several studios.

The central plot of this film is the age-old device of putting the hero’s girlfriend, wife, or child in some kind of danger, and the rest of the film is protagonist’s efforts to try to save her. Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto showed how this extremely simple narrative can pay off like three cherries on a Las Vegas slot machine.  It is a wind-up toy that once put into motion is almost impossible to screw up, but this is Roland Emmerich.  He is not as good a filmmaker as Gibson or even Brett Ratner for that matter. 

            One of the things that Emmerich has always been good at is finding an up-and-coming actor to center his movie on, whether it was Heath Ledger, Will Smith, or Jake Gyllenhaal.  This go around he has turned to Steven Strait (Sky High, The Covenant) to carry this picture.  Never heard of him? Don’t worry.  You probably will not again unless he shows up at your door in a few years delivering the pizza you just order.  He is another in a long line of pretty-boy male models with almost no charisma and even less acting ability. He plays D’Leh, our hero.  Yet, he appears to have almost Oscar-like potential compared to his love interest, Evolet, played by extremely attractive Camilla Belle (When a Stranger Calls, The Quiet). She appears to have studied at the Paris Hilton/Jessica Biel/Jessica Alba school of acting. Every time she appears on the screen, you can almost hear one of the old studio bosses screaming, “Just look pretty, grunt, and point.”

    What lesson should you take away from 10,000 B.C.?  First, since the beginning of time, everyone has wanted to have sex with skinny white chicks, especially the dude who has the big white spear.  The only such weapon like that I had ever heard about was owned by some dude named John Holmes, and he is dead.  While not Birth of a Nation, and I don’t think Roland Emmerich intended it to be a wee bit racist, but the film should have been subtitled Birth of a Civilization.  If these Homo sapiens had been around 1,000 centuries ago, I am pretty sure Cornelius and Zira would be enjoying a little monkey love in their penthouse apartment at the top of the food chain. 

            We are introduced to our hero D’Leh during a mammoth hunt.  Whoever kills a wooly mammoth gets to possess the huge white spear.  Now I know that every woman who has studied history knows that there is no such thing as a huge white spear and that is what SUVs and sport cars are for, but go with the movie.  The guy who has the big white spear gets the boney white chick.  Stop laughing.  It is not funny.  Yes, it is.  Now, you would think in a hand-to-mouth existence, nomadic cave dwellers would want a wife who was strong enough to work all day while they are off hunting and who has hips wide enough to allow her uterus to be a clown car because you are going to need those offspring to survive, but no.  Our caveman ancestors are attracted to the same self-centered, annoying, skinny blonde bimbos whose idea of roughing it is daddy cutting off the credit cards, except with a little mud smeared on them.

            D’Leh, who has a ton of daddy issues because his daddy left when he was little (given the time period, I would guess that most people lost their daddies before they lost their baby teeth), through a fluke kills a mammoth. Still, he gets the white spear and a chance to bed the prehistoric Paris Hilton.  But like my first date, he is going to show up and the girl is not there.  While the men are off hunting, some dark-looking Arabian dudes are going to attack the village and take our girl-with-the-body-of-a-12-year-old-boy away.  Arab-looking men touching our white women, God forbid.  Where are the Klan, David Duke, and skinheads when you need them?  With no one from the Republican Party in sight, D’Leh, Tick Tock, and another friend must handle things themselves.  They are off in pursuit of the bad guys through mountains, deserts, and jungles.  Along the way they run into prehistoric ostriches—that’s right, badass, giant ostriches with attitudes and a saber-tooth tiger.   Will D’Leah save his princess with an eating disorder?  Will he show her his “white spear”?  More importantly, why the hell did I sit through the whole thing when I could have chatted up the pretty girl at the snack bar? 

Verdict: Strike Out