Today I went to see Roland Emmerich's 10 000 B.C. with two friends.
The good part is that I was really laughing my head of once it was save to do so (that is after the movie ended and laughter wouldn't bother the audience anymore). I haven't had such a great laughter in ages. I was literally laughing tears
The bad part is that what I was laughing about was meant to be serious.
I went into this movie expecting to see a kind of docu-drama, a fictional story that gave an insight on how people may have lived and thought 12 000 years ago. But what I saw was so silly that it gained entertainment value from that.
Granted, there were impressive pictures (many of which were very directly inspired by the lord of the rings movies) and granted, there was some nice music too.
But the best of all were really the funny elements not supposed to be funny at all. There were thick furred Mammoths in the desert and there were domesticated Mammoths helping to build the Pyramids (which in reality weren't built until about 7000 to 8000 years later). They weren't satisfied with building one Pyramid at a time but had several in the progress. To "top" it all one of the Pyramids had a huge golden tip on the top which bore too extreme resemblance to the freemasonry symbolic that can even be found on $ bills. Just what exactly did they mean to suggest in that scene in which that tip was tumbling all the way down the Pyramid?
Most of the characters remained almost anonymous throughout the story. Their ability to stay clean (excepting a few scenes in the beginning where they appeared to be smeared with earth and colors for some ritual reason not further explained) and unscratched while running through mountains, jungles, and deserts all the time is remarkable. The only thing hinting at them living millenias before the "invention" of bath or shower were their dreadlocks which did not however look like one would expect hair too look that has never seen a comb. Their mastering of modern language is really remarkable. I can only speak for the German translation here, but there the "love talk" of the two maincharacters was schmaltzy even by modern day standarts. It seemed to come straight from some Victorian romance.
The "bad guys" (who were suggested to come from Atlantis) were good for a laugh too. They looked like a mixture of Tibetan monk, alien from outer space, and Thai dancer. And in the German version they all had ridiculously squeaky voices.
When there was a "tragic death scene" in that movie my friend sitting beside me thought that I was crying while in fact I was trying to breathe deep to muffle my laughter into quite chuckles. I don't usually do that in "tragic" death scenes, but this one was just ridiculous and as the dead one ended up alive again anyway there is no need for me to have a guilty consciousness.
