"She Who Must Not Be Named" and I recently toddled off to the Cineplex to see 10,000 BC.
What a travesty! It's just the kind of thing to get the old Teutonic juices flowing.
The storyline:
Aryan hero descends from Valhalla leading a band of barbarian warriors to rescue his blue-eyed true love from cruel Semitic villains who have captured her and lust for her pure Germanic womanhood [You might have noticed that all the bad guys have really big, hooked noses].
He rallies to his cause tribes of black-skinned people who are also being oppressed by the big-nosed Semites. The blacks naturally follow their white-skinned savior because..., well, because he they naturally recognize his racial superiority and mystical connection with nature.
Our hero then leads his warriors across a vast and trackless, previously impassible, desert waste and, incidentally, discovers astronomy [he's smart as well as hunky].
Finally, this untutored, but naturally superior, barbarian from the north leads a slave revolt that topples the effete [hints of homosexuality and pederasty] priests [Egyptian/Atlantean, who cares..., they're civilized and therefore evil -- shades of Rousseau] who are enslaving the free, uncivilized peoples of the world. He then leads his people back to Valhalla, carrying with him the secrets of agriculture.
Along the way our hero fights various critters and becomes buddies with the king of the beasts. I couldn't figure out if he was supposed to be Conan, or Tarzan, or Lawrence of Arabia, or maybe Moses or the "Beastmaster" or maybe even Androcles. What a mashup of heroic icons!
Horrible script, horrible acting, horrible soundtrack, total mindlessness, decent CGI [with nothing of substance to distract you from the spectacle]. I kinda enjoyed it, but as soon as my mental faculties clicked in I felt guilty for doing so.
In oh so many ways this film is reminiscent of the old exotic adventure flicks of the twenties and thirties. I would have thought that you could not make it these days. I'm fairly sure it could not have been made in Hollywood, and Emmerich could have been prosecuted for making it in Germany, what with their restrictions on speech and thought. But they found a way around all that PC nonsense.
The film was made in New Zealand and South Africa by Germans, with Greek CGI techs, mostly bankrolled by Eurotrash, and starring an international cast of "B" or lower list actors. Funny, the cosmopolitan "international community" seems to be a lot less sensitive on these matters than we are here in the US.
One thing I can say for the production. Camilla Belle is a cutie -- but even so she ain't Racquel, not even close (but then, when you think about it nobody is). The kid's actually got some chops. Pity they didn't give her any dialogue. I sure hope this mess doesn't end her career.
