From the Trenches - Movies - A Mammoth Waste - Archaeology Magazine Archive


Movies: A Mammoth Waste	Volume 61 Number 3, May/June 2008
by Zach Zorich

Given film director Roland Emmerich's track record, I was expecting 10,000 B.C. to have about as much to do with archaeological fact as his film The Day After Tomorrow had to do with the realities of climate science. All I had hoped for was a new vision of what life 12,000 years ago might have looked like. Instead, he settles for rehashing the fictional past that Erich von Däniken and Graham Hancock have been peddling since the 1970s. The people in Emmerich's world are stupid; therefore, all of the great feats of engineering come from Atlantis or outer space.

Run away from the movie 10,000 B.C. as if a mammoth was chasing you. (Courtesy Warner Brothers Pictures)

The best parts of the film are the mammoths. An early hunting scene is beautiful and exciting--even if the elephants are much too large and the dreadlocked hunters try to catch them with a net. Unsurprisingly, this tribe is starving, but it is hard to have sympathy for them because any culture that tries to hunt mammoths with a net gets what it deserves no matter how cool their hair is.

After the hunt, the movie takes off into a patchwork of scenes that were done better in other films: horse raiders attack the village (Conan the Barbarian), they haul the people away to a mysterious city (Apocalypto), the hero's girlfriend is kidnapped and he embarks on a quest to save her (Last of the Mohicans), and the film climaxes with a scene that is almost identical to the ending of 300. But the worst part is how slowly the film moves. By the time the hero, D'leh, reaches a city that looks like a mishmash of Old and New Kingdom Egypt transported back in time 7,500 years, you feel as if you have climbed mountains and crossed a desert too.

Of course, there is a generic love story, but there is no way to know how the characters feel until they announce it in stilted caveman-speak that makes them seem like animated mannequins from a museum diorama. Humans have had modern language ability for more than 40,000 years, and the movie would have been better if they had used it. Primitive people have always been an empty canvas that filmmakers have filled with their ideas about humanity's basic nature, but Emmerich largely leaves that canvas blank. The only thing this film says is, "give me your money."