12 March 2008

10,000 BC


So if you're the sort of person who lies awake at night wonder "Boy, wouldn't it be great if someone made a movie about a fictional history where the human timeline and the Stargate universe intersect!" I'd say to you, "Well, someone already did and its called Stargate" and you'd reply "No! I mean other than that!"

Well, your dream has come true in Roland Emmerich's latest "film" 10,000 BC.

I won't really get into any spoiler details, but considering my girlfriend is an anthropologist, it was a field day of wrongitude in cinema, including (but very much not limited to:)

- Horses. Domesticated about 5000 years after the movie is set.
- Iron cuffs. Again, not a lot of iron-working 12,000 years ago.
- Predatory birds. Huh? Are we in New Zealand? No, we're not (see below).
- Mammoths. I won't even go there, just needless to say they get hunted in all the wrong ways.
- Sabretooth cats. Apparently, in the long run, they're about as mean as my cat.
- Agriculture. Let's grow corn in the mountains. Wait, no, let's have agriculture way too early. Wait, no! Let's have new world plants in the old world!

Speaking of the world.

Can someone name me a continent where you can, in succession, travel southerly and go from high mountains, to tundra, to tropical, bamboo-filled jungle (with giant birds), to semi-arid deserts (with sabretooth cats!), to a vast desert, to a fertile crescent? Travelled all on foot. In probably less than a month or two. Yeah, me neither.

Needless to say, beyond the science, the storyline is pretty much "boy meets girl, boy hunts mammoth, girl is kidnapped by extras from Stargate Atlantis, boy goes to rescue her, boy fights feathered raptors, boy meets up with every stereotypical African tribe ever, boy throws a spear." You know, the typical love story of the ages.

If I were you, I'd flip back and forth between Sci-Fi channel reruns of Stargate SG-1 and Animal Planet and you should get the same effect.

1 comment:

Jesse said...

That is hilarious. I'm glad someone else picked up on the Stargate thing - I haven't seen 10,000BC (or 10,000AD, for that matter), but the first time I saw the preview my first thought was definitely "where's MacGuyver and/or Kurt Russell??".

Now you know how I felt watching 'The Core' with my grad school buddies. They didn't even mention D''!!!