10,000 B.C. | DVD Review

Roland Emmerich goes from a disaster movie (The Day After Tomorrow) to a movie that is a complete disaster with 10,000 B.C. This movie is so bad that viewing it might give you cancer.

10,000 B.C. is, from a marketing stand point at least, a byproduct of the success of films like Apocalypto, 300 and the Chronicles of Narnia, presenting itself as a pseudo-historic, “legend film” with magical elements. But Roland Emmerich doesn’t get anywhere near creating a believable history, culture or belief system for his characters. In fact watching the film, it doesn’t really seem like he was even trying to. Absolutely nothing works. From casting to costume and set design, cinematography, fight choreography, CGI and the god-awful script leaden with phony “Lore Speak” that appears to have been written by pulling words like; shadows, winds, great, forefathers, ancient, land, destiny, mighty, darkness, light, gods and prophecy, out of a hat. There is no care put into this film by it makers and it makes everything feels like a cheap lift from better efforts.

As the director of other pieces of cinematic excrement like Godzilla (1998), Universal Soldier, and Independence Day, Emmerich will never be accused of setting the bar too high, but at least those films have some merit (albeit minor) and are watchable with occasional moments of guilty pleasure (“Welcome to Earf” – Will Smith, ID4).
10,000 B.C. doesn’t even achieve a bad movie “cult” value. At least with films like Plan 9 from Outer Space and Rocky Horror, there is a love between the filmmaker and his creation that is evident on the screen, no matter silly the final results are. That’s what gives those movies a soul and it’s why people can enjoy them. !0,000 B.C. is just a dead-thing and will be quickly (mercifully) forgotten.

Unfortunately this film found an audience and had a huge opening weekend (probably aided by an advertising campaign that revealed little to none of the film’s bizarre and inconsistent Germanic-Jamaican accented dialogue) which means that Emmerich was quickly given yet another $200million budget while Scorsese, P.T. Anderson and the Coen Bros. have a litte bit mor leg work to do in order to get their films made.


Even the picture and sound on the DVD is of poor quality.

The special features promise “Awesome additional scenes” that would not have affected the film either positively or negatively in any way as they are really just more of the same bland ridiculous storytelling buried among which is the films only intentionally comedic scene. Naturally the joke falls flat.

The other special feature is an alternate ending that doesn’t so much represent a different direction for the story but more the indecision of the director w what he wanted his resolution to be.

The only good things on this disk are the trailers for The Dark Night and the suspect but interesting looking Batman: Gotham Nights DTV animated anthology.

I’ve already given the film more words than it deserves. If any readers of Ioncinema are interested in a self-inflicted lobotomy, I’m happy to offer the review copy of this DVD to the first person who sends an email to the website’s editor. Sorry, contest open to Montreal readers only. This film is not worth the postage to send it anywhere else.

Movie rating – 0

Disc Rating – 0.5