.: Roberts' Reviews - Movie Reviews :.

Review by Mike Lippert

The recent health food craze has gotten a bit wild. Earlier this year I was at the grocery store and when it came to buying orange juice I was dumbfounded. How about the stuff with the added Omgea-3? I don't know what that means, but it sounded like an added bonus. Thankfully, the person who I was with was more informed on the matter than I. Apparently, when companies put these added bonuses in, they are also taking something out like calcium or other vitamins. The moral of the story: what might originally appear to be helpful on the surface, really doesn't gain you anything in the long run. You could apply that same logic to the use of computer generated effects in filmmaking: they allow filmmakers to show audiences things that have never before been possible, while, in some cases, losing an essential human element: authenticity. That seems to be the case with Roland Emmerich's new film 10,000 BC: its chalk full of special effects, and is basically nonsense.

It revolves around a young native warrior named D'Leh played by a dirtied and dreadlocked Steven Strait, who was so bad in last year's The Covenant that it's no wonder he is barely recognizable here. D'Leh ventures towards civilization with a group of fellow warriors after their village is attacked by savages who take hostages, among whom are, yes, D'Leh's girl. They are guided by Old Mother, the village elder who has the unfortunate narrative task of watching over them vicariously with her magic powers. What a convenient trick.

Along the journey, that somehow miraculously takes place on foot, atop snow-covered mountains, in a jungle and across a desert, with not one single warrior suffering exhaustion or dehydration, the warriors do battle, not only with the villains, but with computer generated mammoths, computer generated tigers, and in one scene, computer generated beasts that look like a cross between a turkey, a dinosaur and that thing from Cloverfield. And to sweeten the pot, there is also a scene in which D'Leh accidently falls into a pit of spikes while casing a herd of computer generated dear, miraculously missing every one of them on the way down. Lucky break.

If this plot sounds a little familiar, that's because its outlines have basically been lifted from Mel Gibson's underrated, computer generated effectsless (or so it would seem) film Apocalypto in which a Mayan warrior must venture off into civilization in order to rescue his fellow villagers who have been captured as sacrifices to the gods who have cast a plague upon the land.

To see Apocaplypto, is to see exactly every step that 10,000 BC takes wrong. Because the film is so glossy, so flashy, so jammed with effects and battle sequences, one feels disoriented within the journey to civilization. There is no temporal link between scenes as we switch from mountaintops, to jungles, to deserts, travelling millions of miles over the span of a single cut. Even individual sequences fail to give us consistent human action. We see D'Leh begin to climb out of the pit he has fallen into and then cut to him out and on his way. Where is the drama in that? Above all 10,000 BC lacks the danger of adventure. Maybe Emmerich and his editor should have picked up a copy of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time in order to learn a few things about the basic logistics of space and time. I haven't read it myself, but I feel educated enough at this point in my life to know that one does not leave a jungle and instantly step into a desert, do they?

I thus fear that Emmerich has cut out the true essentials necessary in order to make us care about this journey even on the most rudimentary level; to feel the hardship of it, see the physical strain it has on the body, the mind and the endurance of the soul. The plot is no more than a collection of unrelated, irrational episodes that jump from one intense battle or obstacle to the next without a single motive to care about. The film is all veneer and varnish.

Therein was the essence of Apocalypto's success and the problem with computer generated effects. Apocalypto, by taking a handheld camera into the jungle, by having (seemingly?) real jaguars and quicksand, put us in direct contact with the physical dangers of Jaguar Paw's journey, which, on top of that, possessed symbolic significance in its attempts to keep the traditions of the village people alive by trying to keep the village structure itself alive. And when the camera pulled back for a long shot of a sweeping jungle vista, we pulled back too and admired its exotic beauty. When we get an extreme long shot of a sweeping vista in 10,000 BC we can't admire it because of its artificiality. The effect draws attention to itself.

This is where film criticism becomes a tricky business. One must, after all, still question if it is fair practice to view 10,000 BC as a failure in light of Apocalypto's undeniable success, especially when one strives to provide a comment on society and people's relation to social power, and the other to be a rousing special effects action film. However, I'd like to think that a film has used the time I put into it to show or teach me something new, to dazzle me, or at least leave me with even the simplest thought, feeling or physical sensation. 10,000 BC fails to exist below the surface, never once stimulating the most basic human levels of sensation: the intellectual or the emotional.

Therefore I think the criticism stands. At the end of the day, when you walk into a video store and see Apocalypto to your right and 10,000 BC to your left, the decision on which one to get should be, like 10,000 BC itself, a no-brainer.