10,000 BC (film)

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10,000 BC
Promotional poster
Directed by	Roland Emmerich
Produced by	Roland Emmerich Mark Gordon Michael Wimer
Written by	Roland Emmerich Harald Kloser
Narrated by	Omar Sharif
Starring	Steven Strait Camilla Belle Cliff Curtis
Music by	Harald Kloser Thomas Wander
Cinematography	Ueli Steiger
Distributed by	Warner Bros.
Release date(s)	Australia March 6, 2008 United States wide release March 7, 2008
Running time	109 min.
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$105 million
Gross revenue	Worldwide $300,414,491

10,000 BC is a 2008 American film from Warner Bros. Pictures set in the prehistoric era, directed by Roland Emmerich and starring Steven Strait and Camilla Belle. The world premiere of the movie was held on February 10, 2008 at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin.^[1][2] General release was on March 7, 2008.^[3]

Contents 1 Plot 2 Cast 2.1 Casting process 3 Production 4 Critical reception 5 Historical inaccuracies 6 Influences of other works 7 DVD release 8 Box office performance 9 See also 10 References 11 External links

[edit] Plot

A tribe of hunter-gatherers called the Yagahl, who live on a remote mountain range, survive by killing mammoths. D'Leh, a young hunter, has a companion named Evolet, an orphan who was found by the tribe. D'Leh, while hunting mammoths, manages to kill one and wins the "White Spear," which is given to the killer of the mammoth. He also wins Evolet in marriage, but feels he deserves neither since he killed the mammoth by accident.

One day, D'Leh and several others are away when horse-riding raiders called the "Four Legged Demons" attack the Yaghal camp. They enslave Evolet and D'Leh, Tic'Tic, and Ka'Ren pursue them to save her. Baku, whose mother was killed during the raid, joins them later. They are attacked by terror birds in the jungle, along with the raiders. In this encounter, Tic'Tic gets wounded and Baku and Ka'Ren are captured. D'Leh rescues Evolet, but she is later re-captured. Continuing on, they meet others whose loved ones were taken by the raiders. D'Leh and Tic'Tic befriend Nakudu, leader of the Naku tribe. He tells D'Leh of a prophecy: whoever talks to the "Spear-Tooth" will help free their people. D'Leh had earlier saved a saber-toothed cat from drowning in a trap. The saber-tooth then spared his life, and he realizes the prophecy was about him. Nakudu explains that his loved ones were taken in the "Great Red Birds," or ships with large red sails, to the "Mountains of the Gods," from which no one has ever returned. They then come together with other tribes, who agree to form a coalition to pursue the raiders.

They find the ships with red sails holding Evolet and Baku. They have no means to follow the ships, so they journey through a vast desert, where they discover a relatively advanced civilization similar to ancient Egypt, which is ruled by an enigmatic figure known as "The Almighty," who is said to be the last survivor of his kind. The Almighty, who is regarded as a living god, possesses many thousands of slaves that he is using to build a huge pyramid complex in his honor and possibly for his burial. D'Leh finds an escaped slave, and notices he is wearing a bracelet worn by D'Leh's father. D'Leh's father left his tribe for food and found the Naku tribe before being stolen by the raiders. In a night attack, the guards of the slaves discover D'Leh behind a pyramid. Tic'Tic dies during the attack. Meanwhile, the Almighty's priests discover Evolet wears scars on her hand patterned after the "Mark of the Hunter," the brightest star in all of the heavens. The priests believe it is part of a prophecy that whoever wears the mark of the Hunter is destined to kill the Almighty. D'Leh starts a full-scale rebellion amongst the slaves. They cause the mammoth herd to stampede and kill a large number of troops.

The Almighty offers Evolet to D'Leh in exchange for abandoning his rebellion. The Almighty says that if D'Leh takes his wife, his warriors can return, but the rest must be his slaves forever. D'Leh feigns acceptance of the deal which allows him to throw a spear at the Almighty and kill him, proving that he is not a god. During the ensuing battle, a raider kidnaps Evolet on horseback. Evolet grabs an arrow and stabs the warlord in the side, knocking them both off the horse. D'Leh rushes towards her, but the raider shoots her in the back. D'Leh kills the raider and returns to Evolet, who dies in his arms. The scene shifts to the wise woman as she breathes in deeply and then breathes out her last breath. The scene then returns to D'Leh cradling Evolet's body when she suddenly awakens, restored by the wise woman's sacrifice. They depart for home and bid farewell to the other tribes. They return home and kiss passionately as the screen fades in the sun.

In an alternative ending, the scene shifts forward many years into the future, showing Baku's retelling of the story by the camp fire. It ends with a child asking what had happened to the "Mountains of the Gods," and Baku responds "They were taken back by the sands. Lost to time, lost to man."

[edit] Cast

• Steven Strait as D'Leh (an anagram for "Held" which is the German, Dutch and Afrikaans word for "hero"), a mammoth hunter and the main protagonist.
• Camilla Belle as Evolet, D'Leh's love and the only survivor of a different tribe; one which was killed off by the "Four Legged Demons" (fierce warriors on horseback). While kidnapped, her hands were whipped, leaving a scar in the shape of the "hunter" - a foreshadowing of the one who will defeat the Almighty. She is unique in that she has blue eyes.
• Cliff Curtis as Tic'Tic, D'Leh's mentor.^[4]
• Joel Virgel as Nakudu, leader of the Naku tribe.
• Afif Ben Badra as Warlord, leader of the "Four Legged Demons"
• Mo Zinal as Ka'Ren
• Nathanael Baring as Baku
• Mona Hammond as Old Mother, the Yagahl wise old woman.
• Marco Khan as One-Eye, Warlord's main henchman.
• Reece Ritchie as Moha
• Joel Fry as Lu'Kibu
• Kristian Beazley as D'Leh's father, who had lived with the Naku tribe and learned agriculture from them.
• Junior Oliphant as Tudu, Nakudu's son.
• Boubacar Badaine as Quina, leader of another tribe.
• Tim Barlow as the Almighty. The Almighty is a tall, blue eyed man who dresses in long white robes and a face-concealing veil. He is the last of three kings, and the last of the Atlanteans. He also fears the "Hunter", who is foretold to bring about his downfall.
• Omar Sharif as the Narrator / elderly Baku

[edit] Casting process

Emmerich opened casting sessions in late October 2005.^[5] In February 2006, Camilla Belle and Steven Strait were announced to star in the film, with Strait as the mammoth hunter and Belle as his love.^[6] Emmerich felt that casting well known actors would distract from the realistic feel of the prehistoric setting. "If like, Jake Gyllenhaal turned up in a movie like this, everybody would be, 'What's that?'", he explained. Unknown casting also helped keep the film's budget down.^[7]

[edit] Production

Director Roland Emmerich and composer Harald Kloser originally penned a script for 10,000 BC. When the project received the greenlight from Columbia Pictures, screenwriter John Orloff began work on a new draft of the original script. Columbia Pictures, under Sony Pictures Entertainment, dropped the project due to a busy release calendar, and Warner Bros. picked up the project in Sony's vacancy.^[8] The script went through a second revision with Matthew Sand and a final revision with Robert Rodat.^[6] Emmerich rejected making the film in an ancient language (similar to The Passion of the Christ or Apocalypto), feeling it would not be as emotionally engaging.^[9]

Production began in spring 2006 in South Africa and Namibia.^[6] Location filming also took place in southern New Zealand^[10] and Thailand. Before shooting began, the production had spent eighteen months on research and development for the computer generated imagery. Two companies recreated prehistoric animals. To cut time (it was taking sixteen hours to render a single frame) 50% of the CGI models' fur was removed, as "it turned out half the fur looked the same" to the director.^[7]

[edit] Critical reception

The film received largely negative reviews from critics, stating that the movie is mainly visual and lacks a firm screenplay. Critics went on to say that the film is extremely inaccurate archaeologically. As of December 29, 2008, the review aggregator at Rotten Tomatoes has reported that 9% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 135 reviews.^[11] Metacritic reported the film had an average score of 34 out of 100, based on 29 reviews.^[12]

[edit] Historical inaccuracies

Yahoo! movies featured 10,000 BC at the top of their list of "The 10 most historically inaccurate movies". Below is a list of noted historical and archaeological flaws:

• One of the main blunders of the film that was pointed out by Yahoo! movies was the depiction of the use of mammoths in the construction of Egyptian pyramids. Quoting the website's review, "Woolly mammoths were not, in fact, used to build pyramids. Heck, woolly mammoths weren't even found in the desert. They wouldn't need to be woolly if that were the case..."
• In the later portions of the film, D'Leh and his group come to Egypt in order to save the rest of their people, taken captive therein. These slaves were forced to work on building a pyramid, as well as a sphinx. However, neither of the two were being built in Egypt until about 2,500 BC.
• The path that the main protagonists (the Yagahl) and antagonists (the "Four Legged Demons") take to the Egyptian Pyramids makes no sense. Based on the Yagahl's appearance and the geography of their homeland it is implied that they come from somewhere in eastern Europe or western Asia. This means that they would have to travel south through Anatolia to reach the pyramids. However, the characters are shown journeying all the way to a portion of the Nile river in the middle of the desert (which would have been in southern Egypt), and then sailing north up to the river to the "head of the snake". This means that the characters would have had to bypass the pyramids on their way south to the southern portion of the Nile, only to travel hundreds of miles back north.
• There is a scene in the film where a telescope, which wouldn't be invented until the 17th century AD, and a map of western Africa, Europe and the coast of America is briefly shown.
• The Terror birds were indigenous to the Americas and had gone extinct 1.8 million years before.
• The earliest known use of sailing ships was around 3500 B.C.^[13].
• The film shows humans riding horses which were not domesticated until around 3,500 BC.
• The use of swords and other bladed weapons are also anachronistic as the first swords date to the late 3rd millennium BC in the Middle East.
• There is no evidence that Cro-Magnon Man ever hunted mammoths with a net.
• The Naku tribe fed D'Leh red peppers and gave him seed corn. Both of these were from the Americas.
• The Naku tribe gave the seeds corn to D'Leh, however, at the end of the movie, he and his wife were shown to grow wheat.
• The Woolly Mammoth and the Smilodon are over-sized.
• Smilodon did not live in Africa, this means it might have been Dinofelis. If so, it was extremely over-sized, given true Sabre-teeth, and also, Dinofelis went extinct 1.3 million years previously.

The magazine Archaeology had an article giving the movie a bad review due to the inaccuracies.

However, in the special features of the DVD it is asserted that some of these inaccuracies were deliberately included to show the existence of an advanced civilisation as yet undiscovered by modern archaeology (See Fingerprints of the Gods). Given the directors personal interest in Fingerprints of the gods together with the fact that the map in the film mentioned above also shows an enormous island in the centre of the Atlantic Ocean, implys that Emmerich`s 'Almighty' is a refugee from an ancient Atlantis, re-established in Egypt at around 10000 BC. Features such as the maps, multi-racial priesthood (including subservient ethnic groups from all over the globe) the enormous ocean going ship and the telescope all go towards supporting this fantasy of an ancient advanced culture that was lost to history between its destruction in 10000 BC and the eventual rise of an indigious Egyptian culture thousands of years later.

The notion that the advanced 'Atlanteans' in this story could feasibly design the pyramids using the well developed science and engineering they exhibited (remember their boat, map etc), together with mammoth labour is interesting. Many questions still lay wide open as to how the ancient Egyptians managed to do this themselves. The need to hunt far and wide for slaves at a time when the world was less populated and even bring, possibly juvenile, mammoths from the far north to work on the construction of the pyramids were other imaginative aspects.

Taking all this for granted, the above talk of 'historical inaccuracies' is perhaps misplaced in many cases, just as it would be in the context of any 'Atlantis' fantasy story.

[edit] Influences of other works

Glenn Whipp of the Los Angeles Daily News draws numerous comparisons between 10,000 BC and other films in the prehistoric and historic film genre, especially One Million Years B.C.^[14] and Apocalypto^[15][16]. A. O. Scott of The New York Times compared it to John Ford's film The Searchers and also the animated film Ice Age.^[17]

At the 2008 Wondercon, Emmerich mentioned the fiction of Robert E. Howard as a primary influence for the film's setting, as well as his love for Quest for Fire and the book Fingerprints of the Gods.^[18]

[edit] DVD release

The DVD of the film was released on June 24, 2008 in single disc editions of DVD and Blu-ray Disc in the United States. Best Buy will release a 2-disc limited edition along with the DVD and Blu-ray Disc releases. It was released on 21 July, 2008 in the United Kingdom.^[19] The film grossed $31,341,721 in DVD sales, bringing its total film gross to $300,414,491.^[20]

[edit] Box office performance

In its opening weekend, the film grossed $35.8 million in 3,410 theaters in the United States and Canada, ranking #1 at the box office, and grossing over $22 million more than the film in second place, College Road Trip.^[21][22] As of April 29, 2008, it has grossed approximately $268.6 million worldwide — $94.6 million in the United States and Canada and $174 million in other territories^[23] — including $17.2 million in Mexico, $12.9 million in Spain, $11.4 million in the United Kingdom, and $10.8 million in China. This also makes it the first film of 2008 to surpass the $200 million mark.^[24]

[edit] See also

• List of American films of 2008
• 100 Million BC - A direct-to-DVD film by The Asylum
• One Million Years B.C. - A similar film released in 1966

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Official website
• 10,000 BC at the Internet Movie Database
• 10,000 BC at Rotten Tomatoes
• 10,000 BC at Metacritic
• 10,000 BC at Box Office Mojo
• 10,000 BC at Allmovie
• 10,000 BC: SciFi.com on movie's historical inaccuracies

Preceded by Semi-Pro	Box office number-one films of 2008 (USA) March 9	Succeeded by Horton Hears a Who!
Preceded by Meet the Spartans	Box office number-one films of 2008 (AUS) March 9	Succeeded by Vantage Point
Preceded by Vantage Point	Box office number-one films of 2008 (UK) March 16	Succeeded by Horton Hears a Who!

v • d • e Films directed by Roland Emmerich 1980s Das Arche Noah Prinzip (1984) · Joey (1985) · Hollywood-Monster (1987) 1990s Moon 44 (1990) · Universal Soldier (1992) · Stargate (1994) · Independence Day (1996) · Godzilla (1998) 2000s The Patriot (2000) · The Day After Tomorrow (2004) · 10,000 BC (2008) · 2012 (2009)