10000 BC

That's it. Once again they got me. Once again I opted for the easy solution, the one that was gonna leave my brain in standby for a while. Once again I trusted a blockbuster to entertain me a minimum with decent special effects and good action packed sequences. And once again I lost my time.

Roland Emmerich could be described as Michael Bay's evil (eviler ? ) twin. However when Bay seems to be getting better at what he does - Ah come on ! Transformers is definitely more enjoyable than Armageddon !- Emmerich seems to go the opposite direction and his "quality" standards are dropping dramatically as his career goes on. Already the quite ridiculous CG wolves in "The day after tomorrow" should have been enough to make me think twice before watching 10000 BC. What can I say... We all make mistakes. But let's scratch the wound open.

Question : Is it really too much to ask for a half decent storyline these days ? You know, not a "life changing experience" type of storyline but just something that kinda holds together and makes sense to a certain extent. Well, apparently it is too much to ask. I had decided not to talk about the plot in my review but in all fairness it's not going to take long :
The good guys (you know they're good because they're good looking and they speak) are attacked by the bad guys (you know they're bad because they're fierce ugly and they grunt) who kidnap the hero's very cute girlfriend, and, doing so, start a chase across jungle, desert, mountains and more or less any kind of landscape you can wander in. And...well... that's about it really. That in itself wouldn't be too much harm if the story was cleverly put together. It's definitely not the case. We're jumping from one scene to another without any kind of link or sense which completely ruins the "epic factor" that should have been there.
Also I know this wasn't supposed to be the History channel stuff but come on ! They used mammoth pets to build the pyramids ?! Seriously lads...

Surely the action scenes and the special effects were gonna save the day! No, the main problem being that everything looks awful cheap. The mammoths look a bit too "cartoony", so does the sabertooth tiger. Apocalypto (clearly the source of inspiration for this movie) was written in mayan language which brought a wee touch of realism to the whole thing, here they just gave a vague eastern-european accent to the characters, don't ask me why.... Even the main bad guy seems to be wearing several layers of clothes to make him look bigger... Pathetic.

I'm not gonna say anything about the actors because to be fair they had no material whatsoever to work with, the dialogue being nothing short of dreadful. I just wish them good luck for the future. They're probably worth better than this.

In recent years a few movies such as Sin City, Kill Bill, 300 (oh man, that was cool!) and even Apocalypto or Transformers proved that you can put up a good show even without a strong story. For each of these the whole storyline could be written on a stamp but it didn't really matter; in the end these films were visually cool and highly entertaining. 10000 BC isn't... by any standards. To avoid like the plague.

1/5 only because I'm in a good mood