♥ Princessa's Royal Diary ♥ - Royalty has never been so PINK!

When was my last movie review again? Oh wait, did that the day before. Haha. Duh. Silly me.

Anyway, this is in late as usual. (Been saying that quite a bit lately.) Teddybear, Vanessa, Celest, Anne, and myself went to catch a 9.50pm movie at Plaza Singapura last week.

Guess what movie we picked?

Duh. Sooo obvious - 10,000 BC.

To be honest, I was rather reluctant to move my butt off my nice white-IKEA-chair to watch 10,000 BC. Thing is, the movie has utterly failed to impress the critics and as far as I'm concerned, I've haven't exactly written a two-thumbs-up movie review yet.

So yeah. I was expecting to be disappointed. And I was.

On the other hand, Roland Emmerich, the Director of the film, clearly doesn't care much for the critics. As he stated in a recent interview with The Guardian.

"I'm making movies for the masses," says Emmerich, unashamedly.

Why does no other director admit to that trait? "Because they're all lying," he says with a smile.

"Do you think they don't want to make movies for the masses? Come on ... These movies are expensive. A lot of people have to see it, like it and come back. If you start making movies for film critics, you've lost."

This is probably a good thing, because 10,000 BC is currently languishing on a mere 10% on the movie rating website Rottentomatoes.com which I do not think much of. To put things in perspective, Eddie Murphy's shocking, Razzie-winning Norbit got 9%.

Enough of the "he says she says", "back to the movie?"

Every movie needs a hero and this comes in the form of D'Leh (Steven Strait), a woolly-mammoth hunter who has grown up under a cloud of shame ever since his father mysteriously left the tribe for seemingly cowardly reasons.

D'Leh has found his heart's passion, the beautiful Evolet (Camilla Belle), a pretty girl with blue eyes, who has lived with D'Leh's tribe ever since her own people were wiped out by the so-called "four-legged demons", which or rather who are in fact, men on horseback.

To win her hand, though he has already won her heart, D'Leh proves himself to be a capable hunter, by accidentally taking down the mammoth single-handedly.

Since no one knew it was "merely an accident", he claimed the white spear, which is the tribe's symbol of power and leadership, and with it his woman, Evolet.

However, in no less then a day, he returns he spear to his mentor and surrogate father figure Tic Tic (Cliff Curtis), one of the elders, for he had not gained the recognition through the kind of bravery that's apparently needed.

Have I mention about the horsemen?

Apparently the so-called "four-legged demons", or rather, horsemen, return and carry Evolet off, along with many of D'Leh's tribesmen. (Typical, if I may add.)

Now it is up to D'Leh to try to rescue the damsel in distress and of course, his fellow tribesmen (though it does seems he cares more for the damsel), with the help from Tic Tic that is.

Meanwhile, the tribe's mystical matriarch, Old Mother (Mona Hammond), stays "at home" and "watches" everything that happens to them from afar.

At nearly every step of the journey, the film falls back on tired cliches, and in such a lazy way that the filmmakers themselves seem to be tired of them.

Lots of movies, such as the recent Rambo sequel, have included a scene in which the hero arrives and rescues the girl just as she is about to be raped, but most movies try to generate at least a little tension, to convince you that anything could have happened and the hero arrived not a moment too soon. But in 10,000 BC, the bad guy just sort of walks up to the girl and puts his hand on her mouth because, well, it's time for the hero to show up, and the bad guy has to be doing something.

Instead of thinking about what a relief it is that the hero got there in time, you think about what a coincidence it is that the "bad guy" decided to act at that very moment.

If I do say so myself, it would be flattering a movie like 10,000 BC to suggest it has anything in common with Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, but, well, in it's own little way, I guess it does.

After all, both movies concern men from primitive hunter-gatherer tribes who are captured and enslaved by warlords from an oppressive urban society, and both movies feature ominous prophecies and key sequences set at pyramid-like temples. (Jungles, deserts, pyramids, what's next?)

But where Apocalypto is deeply informed by its director's obsessions with the nature of religion, and so on, 10,000 BC will take your money, rob your time and hit your brain like a shot of Novacaine. (If you get what I mean.)

You can get a sense of how derivative and half-baked this movie is from watching one of the early trailers, which boldly proclaimed:

"Before everything we know, lies a legend never told."

For one, how can something be a "legend" if it has "never" been told?

Beats me, but that's not the point is it.

As with the trailer, so with the film.

The problem is not that the film has prophecies, heroic journeys, people and animals staring meaningfully into each other's eyes, or clairvoyant mystics who can see what's going on from hundreds of miles away.

The problem is that these and other elements are cobbled together in a way that doesn't seem to follow any sort of internal logic.

Everything you see is a stereotype and cliche. All men are nicely shaved, women wear bras, perfect teeth, manicured hands, and not forgetting, the costumes are kinda a cliche too.

The motions were rather fake and the CGIs... Well it could have been better.

The world of this film is populated by cultures and animals that seem "historical" enough but almost certainly never occupied the same geographic space at the same time.

To cite just one example, the sabretooth tiger lived in North and South America and is believed to have gone extinct around 10,000 BC, if not earlier. So the fact that such creatures form a significant part of this film does not stretch credulity too much, then again, the film also features entire tribes of people who are distinctly African in appearance.

So now, exactly which continent is this movie supposed to be taking place? I'm getting confused. Aren't you?

Do I have anything good to say? Apparently not.

Here's a hilarious statement from a fellow blogger:

My friend asked me before the movie,'will the characters be speaking in english?' 'Hell no,' i defended, 'this is 10,000 BC! I m walking out of here if they do.' To my utter disappointment, right from the beginning the narrator and all characters spoke english, they even act a little american, and surely, the whole epic adventure that results in many brutal deaths all revolves around nothing but to save 'the girl with blue eyes'.

Like The Guardian said:

No one makes movies quite like Roland Emmerich. His films are spectacles that boggle the imagination and defy logic ...

Need I say more?

Verdict

All was expected. Enough said.