As a movie reviewer, I find that my initial instinct is to see movies that I want to see and believe will be good, because it serves a two-birds-with-one-stone philosophy.
While that’s all fine and good, this week I decided to shake things up a bit and choose a movie I had absolutely no desire to see and was certain would be awful.
The movie I chose was none other than a disaster of a film that’s been 10,000 years in the making. Yes folks, I’m talking about the adventure epic 10,000 B.C. because hey, everyone likes a comedy.
It became clear fairly early with the movie’s useless opening narration why the trailer relied on reminding us that 10,000 B.C. is directed by the same person as Independence Day.
The narration set the mood for the clichéd set of events that would eventually unfold, but it couldn’t prepare you for how uninterestingly these events would happen.
Ideally, the end of the movie would have been a flash to the present time where the narrator is reading this story to his grandchildren. Needless to say they’d all be sitting there playing Nintendo DS and picking their noses because Grandpa always tells crappy stories.
The narration wasn’t even done by Morgan Freeman. Can you disappoint me any greater 10,000 B.C.?
Answer: Yes.
To touch on the trailer again, if there was anything it got me excited for, it was for the sure-to-be awesome woolly mammoth sequences and all the other inevitable action. They could have had Morgan Freeman tap-dancing in the corner of the screen doing the narration and I would have still been disappointed with these scenes.
That’s not to say all of the mammoths and saber-toothed tigers didn’t look realistic, though I didn’t have a Polaroid to compare them to, it was just that I had trouble caring.
The action sequences in general had that PG-13/how is no one bleeding style that some film analysts would term “boring.” Granted, other films with similar violence-less violence managed to execute the same thing in an entertaining fashion (see Narnia).
Don’t take that as me sayingthat I need blood to keep me entertained but when everything else is boring it doesn’t hurt to have something to look at (see 300).
While gripes about elements such as useless narration and flat action sequences are too numerous to be able to touch on, one would hope that an all-star cast would at least save this ancient train wreck… wrong.
Call me underexposed but in the entire swarming cast I only recognized one person. It bothered me for awhile as I couldn’t place where I’d seen her before, but then it hit me like a rush of waves. Literally.
The person I recognized was the protagonist, D’Leh’s romantic interest and sweetheart for eternity named Evolet played by no other than Camilla Belle.
Not ringing a bell?
I suggest renting her hit Disney Channel original movie, Surf Girls. I would be hard pressed to say she’s finally succeeded in Hollywood, as this film surely won’t be a résumé maker.
As I’m writing this I’m asking myself the same question anyone reading this might be asking: Was there anything good about it?
The simplest way I can answer that is, well, no. The most complicated way I can answer that involves calculus and I don’t feel like delving in to that right now.
I give 10,000 B.C. a D because at the end of the day they still attempted to include woolly mammoths, and I feel their acting abilities are all-too-often over looked.

Questions or comments?
Contact Joe at
JJUnderb9309@winona.edu