Who doesn't
like historical epics? Costume dramas that give you an up-close-and-personal
look at some musty but meaningful period when life was tough, but big things
were happening?
Well, give
director Roland Emmerich credit for attempting a new record in rewinding the
clock. He's dared to take us back to the last ice age, to follow the story of a
small band of our fur-fitted forebears as they mix it up with a non-stop parade
of bad guys. Indeed, the world these heroes occupy seems so riddled with
malevolence, you can understand the incentive somebody might have to flood the
place, and wash away the general pestilence.
"10,000 BC" is one of those ever-popular,
journey-to-manhood flicks. In this case an even-tempered stud named D'leh
(Steven Strait) - the only guy in town with clean hair - tries to overcome a
bad rap: his long-gone Dad is accused of cowardice. That's got to make it tough
during recess, but D'leh shows the schoolyard bullies that he's got what it
takes by single-handedly bagging a wooly mammoth.
This shaggy Pliocene protein seems to be the principal menu item for D'leh's
tribe - which is odd, given that they live above the snow line in a range of
mountains that's more forbidding than the Old Testament. What are mammoth herds
doing up there, anyway? Even goats would have a tough time finding enough to
eat.
Nevermind. D'leh
brings home the proboscidean bacon, and everything is looking good - or at
least as good as things can look in a society where you probably die at a
younger age than your pets - until some prophesied, four-legged demons, a
euphemism for hooligans on horseback, ride into town, ransack the hovels (is
there a reason to bother?), and then ride back out with our hero's blue-eyed
girlfriend in tow. This ticks D'leh off, and shifts the movie into high gear.
What
follows is an epic quest for revenge, and the retrieval of Ms Blue-Eyes - sort
of like Virgil's Aeneid, but without the poetry. D'leh and his buddies pass
from mountains to jungles to sandy deserts as easily as you go from
Tomorrowland to Frontierland by turning a Disneyland
corner. They pick up a few allies, confront a few nasty critters
(saber-toothed tigers and - get this - carnivorous ostriches), and keep
everyone facing the screen wondering what misery will engulf these guys next.
Anachronisms
are thicker than a hippo's neck here, but it's all good (if improbable) fun
that eventually brings our heroes to the nexus of evil - a large-scale
construction project on the relentlessly sandy banks of some river. Well, not
really "some" river, because what the local residents are building - a couple
of giant pyramids, a row of smaller ones, a big ceremonial barque, and a
sphinx - I mean, do I have to spell it out for you?
Archaeologists
with both expertise and tenure tell us that the great pyramids of Giza were
constructed around 2,500 BC. However, a few marginal authors and late-night
radio pundits claim they go back about 12,000 years. The chances that this is
true are about the same as the odds that a wormhole will open up in your
bedroom tonight, and whisk you off to the Large Magellanic Cloud for breakfast
with aliens. But in "10,000 BC," you'll be able to see this hypothesis writ
large on the special effects canvas. This sequence alone is so oddly imposing,
it's worth the price of admission.
Oh, and
there's something else to be gleaned from watching this ice-age epic. For those
who still wonder how ancient peoples could pile up a million squared-off rocks
to make Giza's famous pointy architecture, Emmerich supplies the answer:
domesticated wooly mammoths! That's right; these tusky terrors may be only
sandwich fixings for D'leh, but whoever is building these pyramids has figured
out how to use them to cut the overhead on public works projects. Defanged and
tamed, they slog up and down steep ramps, hauling blocks of limestone behind.
One assumes that the ramps would soon be adequately, if unappealingly, greased.
Well, OK.
It's not really the history of the world, but 10,000 BC has eye candy
and action. And now, when someone asks "did extraterrestrials
build the pyramids?" I can disabuse them of that nutty idea: "Don't be
silly. They were built by a bunch of non-union, wooly mammoths." Works for me.
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