BZHAnne's Blog

I went to see 10,000 BC yesterday. I had looked forward to it for a number of reasons, all of them named Steven Strait, (my hunk-of-the-month pick).

If you are totally ignorant of the following: paleontology, paleobotany, archaeology, ancient history, ethnology, climatology and indeed every science which deals with knowledge of the past, it's a crackin' good adventure film.

If, however, you have more than a passing familiarity with any of the above I must warn you, your willing suspension of disbelief is gonna get clobbered BIG TIME!

How, you ask?

A) Wooly mammoths, a far north ice age mammal, pulling tonnes of stone up a compressed dirt ramp for a pyramid in Egypt. You know Egypt, the DESERT! The HOT desert?

B) A sabre-tooth cat in either northern Egypt of the southernmost part of the Levant. Since they were extinct some several thousand years prior to anyone building much of anything, much less pyramids, well.....

C) A bamboo forest, again either in northern Egypt or the southeastern part of the Levant. Bamboo is indigenous to ASIA, some 8,000 miles away.

D) Being able to trek from icy mountain wastes on foot to the desert of Egypt and the banks of the Nile in a month.

E) A bad guy who's very possibly the "last Atlantean" leading a bunch of factotums who bear a startling resemblance to native Central American tribes.

F) And the big kicker: a pair of Gastornis stomping through that bamboo forest gnoshing on any human they can catch. What's a Gastornis? It's a 15 foot tall flightless bird, carnivorous, and extinct for 20 million years prior to 10,000BC.

So, what you got is a bunch of ice-age mammoth hunters (the good guys), Atlantean slave raiders and pyramid builders (the bad guys) who use mammoths as draft animals and live in northern Egypt which is next door to a bamboo forest riddled with sabre-tooth cats and terror birds.

But hey, if you're 10 and your idea of science has been gleaned from the Sunday supplements and Marvel Comics, then you just might really like this film. It's got lots of action, mayhem, and some nifty stampeding mammoth scenes. And for the pre-adolescent female, it's got a sweet love story, complete with happy ending. Ain't that nice!?

Sorry Steven, I'll just keep popping "Sky High" and "The Covenant" into my DVD player. They're both better pics than this mishmash of creatures, places, timeframes and overall silliness. *deep sigh of regret* And to think that Roland Emmerich COULD have had a real contender, especially in the special effects arena, if only he'd have used a bit of his budget for a science advisor, or at least a student to Google the necessary and very accessible knowledge concerning our past. Ah, well......maybe next time.