Worthless fossil

Let’s face it — history and Hollywood don’t mix. Every time a studio creates a movie based on some sort of historical event, history gets butchered. “Gladiator”, “Pearl Harbor”, “Superman”. While those are all entertaining movies, Tinseltown is notorious for mangling the source material; the treatment is always worse when the source material is historical fact.

“10,000 B.C.” is a coming-of-age story about D’Leh (Strait), a caveman who comes to be the leader of his tribe. He’s set to marry his one true love, the prophesied blue-eyed Evolet (Camilla Belle), but his plans are messed up when a group of nomadic desert pirates arrive on horses and capture many of the cavemen, along with what appear to be African tribesman, and sell them into slavery to help build the pyramids.

Cavemen + pirates + Egyptian pyramids = the best Hollywood could come up with after the writers’ strike? If that’s not enough, apparently the slaves used mammoths to help build the pyramids. And the “Egyptian” god who was orchestrating everything? Just a crusty old white man. Kind of like realizing Darth Vader was a white guy in Return of the Jedi.

Although it’s possible that better acting would have made the story passable, I doubt it. Apparently cavemen speak English, and sometime in the past a caveman taught one of the men in the African tribe how to speak it. Every character in this movie is impossible to believe.

The worst part of this movie was its bad audio and visual composition. On more than one occasion the film is grainy, and not just noisy grain. The grain takes away from what little enjoyment you could force yourself to get out of this movie, because it seems to happen during the “dramatic” scenes.

The computer graphics, supposedly the center-piece of the film, involve horrendously-blatant green screens, obviously-animated crowd scenes and a total lack of realism concerning the behavior of the animals — possibly because most of the animals featured didn’t exist in the same time periods. It’s as if this movie’s effects were sent through a time warp from 1993.

In the end, what really killed this movie was simple: a poorly planned production and an even more poorly written story that has no basis in reality. Just when you think you’ve seen it all, something even more stupid happens.

This movie was nothing more than a copy of “Epic Movie” except without the farcical humor. “1,000 B.C.” took bits and pieces of movies like “Braveheart”, “Gladiator”, “300”, etc., and chopped them together to make the most awful movie ever. This one should be buried in a tar pit somewhere.