A Scientist at the Movies Reviews by Greg Paris

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Title: 10,000 B.C.

Date Viewed: 3/20/08

Details:

Steven Strait (D'Leh)

Camilla Belle (Evolet)

Cliff Curtis (Tic'Tic)

Joel Virgel (Nakudu)

Omar Sharif (narrator)

Written, directed & produced by: Roland Emmerich (director and sometime writer and/or producer for Stargate, Independence Day, Godzilla, The Patriot, The Day after Tomorrow)

Score: Harald Kloser & Thomas Wanker

Score: 0

The Review: Sir, I knew Gilgamesh, and you're no Gilgamesh.

Part of the marketing gimmick for 10KBC informs us this is the story of the first hero. So, is this really Gilgamesh? Not hardly, not even close. Is there any historical basis for the events of the plot? Repeat after me -- not hardly, not even close. But the story is nonetheless engaging, and after a rather slow start, is decently paced. And the SFX are pretty damn good -- and make the movie worth watching if only (but probably only) for that. The mammoths in particular are amazing! (If over-large, but more on that below.)

Joseph Campbell would be proud -- all the tropes of Hero of a Thousand Faces stirred together in one single pseudo-anthropological and paleontological mash-up. Rarely have so many prehistoric themes and factoids been combined with so little attention to accuracy, consistency and evidence -- not since Quest for Fire, at least, when both fire and sex were discovered in a space of two hours.

There are so many bloopers and problems with this movie that I wonder if we might be totally misinterpreting it. This conflation of events certainly didn't happen in the history of the Earth as we know it, so perhaps the phrase "a long time ago in a galaxy far away..." applies. Maybe 10KBC is offering insight into an alternate time-line, or a different Earth-like planet in some distant solar system. So, in the spirit of the "scientific reportage" of Graham Hancock (!), what follows cannot be a blooper-list, but must actually be a series of prehistoric revelations, obtained from the fertile imaginations of the inspired scriptwriters for 10KBC. Here is what we've learned:

• Mammoths and people: Mammoths existed from about 1.6Myr ago to 11Kyr ago, clearly overlapped with humans (e.g., Paleolithic cave art) but only on the very edge of 10KBC. The species was on the wane by the time these events were filmed.
• Mammoths were big: Yes, mammoths have their name for a reason, but were they really two to three times the height of a standing man? These must be examples of Mammut robusticus, evolved under a distant sun.
• Mammoths were migratory: Perhaps, but did they migrate across the foothills of decent snow-covered mountains?, and did they come as far south as the Caucasus or Atlas mountains? Irrespective, these mammoths must have had mutant olfactory systems, unable to smell the men sneaking up amongst them, nor even smell the cooking fires of the inhabited village on their migratory path over the ridges.
• Domestication of the horse: The four-legged monsters are clearly men riding horses, so horses must have been domesticated long before the timeframe that seems reasonable in our world. Here, recent evidence from Kazakhstan indicates a Copper Age date of about 3600 BC, although material evidence of bridles and saddles only appears much later, around 2500 BC. But they did record the approximate geography correctly. Apparently in the alt-Earth, domestication (not only of horses, see below) had a 7000 year head-start.
• Valley vs ridge living: For all that the tribe (or our erstwhile narrator) describes itself as living in the valley of the White (as in "white rain" -- snow, get it?) Mountains, most of the filming seems to have been done on a ridge-line at serious elevation -- not the safest place to establish a community. Perhaps they were only showing the hut of the shaman, which needs to be perched precariously on a distant ridge to prevent interfering brainwaves from the plebes?
• The roc: A flightless, predatory bird several times the mass of a man? Living in a tropical, densely green environment? Perhaps better known as a "terror bird"? Damn close to what I'd call a roc, but I'm likely influenced by too much Arabian mythology. It looks like a hybrid between critters known to exist around the time period -- a hybrid that I'm sure the genetics of our time would prohibit.
• Karst topography: Mountains with a (visible) geological history more appropriate to Guangzhou (and its distinctive limestone provinces) are found immediately adjacent to desert? We learn here that geological provinces can be cognitively unconformant in the same way horizontal strata might be unconformant, probably a peculiar property of the novel world on which these events actually took place.
• Saber-tooth cats were big: At least on the world where this was filmed, these early cats are much larger than fossil evidence we'd be familiar with. Perhaps this (too) is the robustus sub-species..., or perhaps the gravity is less?
• Cultivation of grain, and the adz: Perhaps these are just curious grasses, but they were advertised as if a proto-grain, a domesticated wheat-like plant. So this has to be another planet, because cultivation of grain on our Earth had only just begun around 9KBC, and that was einkorn wheat (again, the geography is not far off), not what we were looking at on screen.
• Astronomical navigation? ("follow that fixed star"): Who knows? This could be true in any culture, and without written history or in the absence of encoding in folklore, we'd never know the skill existed. Or perhaps it was kept secret, as navigational "rutters" were in the 1500's.
• The Nile as a winding river in the shape of a snake, with settlement at its head: But our Nile (if this really is our Nile) is not known to be that sinuous. This tells us that the alt-Earth version must flow more slowly and not suffer quite the annual floods we were familiar with prior to the Aswan Dam.
• Pyramids and monumental buildings, including the golden-cap fantasy: No monumental architecture, no massive stone works at all, are known from this time period -- unless you choose to believe Schoch (Voices of the Rocks) and those who purport that the Sphinx is actually eroded by water, and persists from a much earlier culture. (Come to think of it, the portrayal of the 10KBC Sphinx as feline-faced proves that it must have been periodically recarved by subsequent cultures into the silhouette we are now familiar with.)
• Mammoths as beasts of burden, let alone in proto-Egypt: "Oh, you mean those mammoths!" How were they captured and herded thousands of miles south across a climate and terrain inimical to their biology? Let alone carried across the river? These must be mutant mammoths, indeed, and more pliant than one might expect. While not fully domesticated, they do appear remarkably adapted to both climate and control.
• Detailed printed or scribed maps of Africa, the Mediterranean and Equatorial Atlantic, on some form of paper- or papyrus-like material: Ignoring the paper (whatever) itself, here is the clearest evidence of an advanced civilization, having mapped out continents, oceans, coastlines and seas with an accuracy that permits one, at a glance, to recognize shapes and geography. Which is quite strange, for a distant planet -- evidence in itself that this is more likely an alternate time-line of our familiar Earth. This must have been the mysterious elder culture whose fragmentary charts were somehow retained across countless millennia, and translated into the Portuguese portolans and the infamous Piri Reis map. But perhaps that history never happened in this alternate time-line?
• A gigantic, clinker-built ship: Obviously the Viking influence not only runs deep, but backwards in time. Although typically this design did not draw a deep draft, it still had to float out onto the river at some time -- unless it was purely ceremonial, like those buried inside the pyramids.
• Paleolithic health care: Dental care must have been pretty good back then -- just look at D'Leh's near-perfect teeth. As for contact lenses, it's hard to say whether optical correction was necessary, but they were certainly useful for cosmetic reasons -- just take a look into Evolet's eyes.
• Corn: First of all, corn is a crop of the Americas; secondly, it was not domesticated and selected anywhere near the Paleolithic. I guess the gods of the flying saucers assisted these tribes by transporting the seeds across the oceans, speeding up the evolution of large kernels, and gifting them to the deserving masses. But this all must have happened off-screen, because we see no evidence of extra-terrestrial assistance.
• Fingernails of the ancient Mandarins: Let's see, what culture haven't we yet maligned? The Chinese? OK, remember that they explored and settled around the world in the early 1400's, so why not an earlier culture perhaps 10,000 years earlier? Because they were still in the Stone Age, perhaps? No, not on the world where this was filmed.
• Geography: If the people of the Valley of the White Mountains truly originated in the Caucasus or Anatolians, then after crossing the mountains and a semi-tropical forest and a desert, how did they come to be on the west bank of the Nile? And if instead they came from the mountains on west side of the Nile, the only likely choice of origins are the Atlas mountains of Morocco (NW Africa), and there's no reported prehistoric inhabitants, at least in our world.
• We learn that prophecy and shamanism are satisfactory alternatives to leadership. But then, if the culture of the Nile was as corrupt as portrayed, and this is the only other choice portrayed in the film, the observation and controls may actually be true.

They certainly wasted no money on dialog. Filmed in New Zealand, South Africa, and Namibia -- so as a travelogue, it's attractive. Decent score.

(22-Mar-08)

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