Bad Movie Night: 10,000 BC

The other night, The Machete, The Jake-iddy-Jake, and I decided to take in 10,000 BC and see what all the hype was about. I have to say the movie was extremely watchable. I also have to disclose, however, about 95% of the "watchability" was due to the obscene amount of Grey Goose I had before hand which made its sheer wretchedness seem funny (much like that night I broke my ankle).

The stunning pain I felt the next morning (which may have been more from the movie than the booze) made me realize that 10,000 BC was very much akin to another cinematic masterpiece: Dragon Wars (full review here). To put it very bluntly (and about as eloquently as it deserves), just about every aspect of this movie was sub-par at best (save for the CGI). Direction, acting, and writing all join together like a drunken Voltron to stumble around for about two hours before completely falling apart into a vile lump of garbage.

Now, I am currently reading Graham Hancock's Fingerprints of the Gods, a book which presents evidence of "advanced" cultures which may have existed prior to the settling of the Fertile Crescent. It's a very interesting and involving read, and I guess I figured that 10,000 BC would be somewhat akin to that. While the story kinda-sorta hints at the same theories presented in Hancock's book, I failed to read the fine print.

For those who don't know, the fine print reads "From the Director of Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow." That basically damns any redeemable concept to a hell of large and gaudy sets, digitalized catastrophes, vapid dialog, and good old-fashioned heroes who save the day (aka cheesy endings).

It is my theory that when test audiences saw the first cuts of the movie, the producers took note of when 90% of the test groups fell asleep. They then recut the movie to include massive CGI animals right at those times as a lame attempt to keep movie-goers from walking out with cheap cinematic parlor tricks. "Hey, maybe they won't notice how poor this is if we throw in a big saber-toothed tiger?!?!?!"

It didn't work. While the aforementioned sabertooth tiger, the wooley mammoths, and PCP-addicted giant ostriches were pretty cool, nothing could possibly overcome the absolutely inane dialog delivered by the dreadlock-wearing characters with odd names. "Hey, just throw some hyphens and quotation marks between some vowels - that sounds cavemanish, right?" For additional authenticity, the actors employed the same accent used by Grimlock of the old 1980's Transformers cartoon and the writers added lines about stars, seasons, and agriculture and referred to boats as "birds" or something ridiculous like that.

"Me, Tic-Tic, Angry!!!"

All in all, this movie was mildly entertaining primarily due to the drunken state I saw it in. If I had seen it sober, well, "me, N'de, Angry!!! Want paper color of spring grass with face of previous American chieftain back!!!" Therefore I am going to rate it at a meager 1.25 Dragonwars.

(1 Dragonwars = worst movie ever; 10 Dragonwars = really good movie).