If the title of a film is named after a date in history, shouldn’t it be a historically accurate story? The crew of 10,000 BC obviously didn’t think so and thus didn’t care enough to check up on their facts.
Historians say that horses or ‘four legged demons’ as so called by Old Mother, were not domesticated until as late as 4,000BC. This is just one of many very bad mistakes. A second problem is that dinosaurs were still evolving into birds, particularly the ostrich.
A third issue is trying to figure out literally where in the world the story is set! A small group of hunters from a snowy mountain range try to track down a group of their people who were kidnapped to be enslaved; taken through a jungle, and then an expansive desert, all supposedly in a short distance and short time.
Two other disturbing historical inaccuracies were (1) the building of pyramids and ziggurats thousands of years before their actual existence. (2) The hero and his tribe speak English but all other groups of peoples encountered have their own separate languages.
If society in the year 10,000 BC was so uneventful and needed to be presented drastically different for more action, why wasn’t it given a different title or year? Aside from it sounding good, the given number conjures up many images of primitive, primordial and primeval, life. Because it is before today’s congested materialism, when human relations were more important, and human instinct of hunter gathering societies had not completely given way to government bureaucracy. The year 10,000 BC was humanity’s beginning before settled civilizations. The intentions were to blend pre-historical perceptions and pre-historical mythologies -not facts- with Hollywood’s story conventions.
The result is a $75 million budgeted picture that accomplishes nothing. There is no powerful lesson learned, no tragedy, no awesome victory, and no subtext philosophy, except for momentary minor symbolism. Instead the film is simply about a messiah, D’Leh (Steven Strait) who, while chasing after a girl across three geographical landscapes, nearly gets eaten by a ‘spear-toothed tiger’ and becomes allies with some other tribes to free their enslaved peoples. Meanwhile ‘the girl,’ Nevolet (Camilla Belle), is the damsel-in-distress prophet with a brain and an astronomical scar.
No mainstream film has allowed an ‘other’ character to rape the leading lady. An early example goes back to The Sheik (1921) starring Rudolf Valentino when the enemy tribe leader kidnaps Diana and before the horrible act can occur, the sheik saves her. The same scenario plays out when the kidnapper is kind to Nevolet throughout the entire trip and when he finally has her alone he is interrupted and taken away.
Despite the individual hero and American Biblical ideology, there is one scene relating to Marx’s infamous line referring to religion as “the opium of the people” meaning that religion pacifies the masses.
The trailer was a montage of scenes that tells the above-mentioned plot, not its mistakes. The musical score was a broken record. The characters’ journey was unbelievable and did not have enough pathos. The film demeans the audience’s intelligence by treating history as expendable. The History Channel, the Discovery Channel, A’E, National Geographic, and other like media should file a lawsuit against Warner Bros., Legendary Pictures, and Mark Gordon for libel.
