Despite the film being a box office success, it received negative reviews, being considered one of the worst films of 2008.[1]
Plot
In 10,000 BC, a hunter-gatherer tribe called the Yagahl live in the Ural Mountains. They survived by hunting woolly mammoths, but the animals have become more scarce. A hunter who single-handedly killed a manak and earned the White Spear venerates Old Mother, an elderly Neanderthal with shamanistic powers. The village chief finds a young girl named Evolet, the lone survivor of her village that was massacred by what Old Mother calls "four-legged demons," who will come when "the Yagahl go on their last hunt."
The tribe believes the demons are the mammoths and sets out to hunt the herd leader; however, the current chief does not trust the prophecy and leaves to find another way to save his people. He entrusts the White Spear, his young son D'Leh, and the true purpose of his quest to his friend Tic'Tic. The tribe's children ridicule D'Leh for his father's cowardice, and he seeks comfort from Evolet. The two begin to fall in love.
Years later, when the mammoths finally return, the adult D'Leh hunts them with his tribe's men under Tic'Tic's leadership and kills one by accident, inadvertently winning the White Spear and Evolet. The next day, horse-mounted riders attack the camp. The warlord, taken by Evolet’s beauty, kidnaps her, enslaves the able-bodied, and kills those who fight back, leaving very few survivors. D'Leh, Tic'Tic, Ka'Ren, and a young boy, Baku, set out to rescue their fellow Yagahl as Old Mother follows their journey in spirit. During an attack on the slavers by terror birds, Evolet is recaptured along with Ka'Ren and Baku, and Tic'Tic is wounded. While hunting, D'Leh falls into a pit, where he helps free a trapped saber-tooth tiger, asking it not to eat him before escaping. Tic'Tic recovers and finds their way to a sedentary Naku village, also attacked by the riders. The surviving villagers nearly attack them until the saber-tooth tiger comes to save D'Leh from the initially hostile Naku. They also learn that D'Leh's father was a guest of the Naku before the riders captured him.
Several tribes arrive to form a coalition to defeat the slavers, with D'Leh as their leader. They find the ships holding Evolet and their loved ones but fail to reach them before they cast off. They set out to follow on foot, and D'Leh learns to use the North Star to navigate the journey. D'Leh and the tribes discover an advanced Egyptian civilization ruled by the "Almighty", an untouchable god-king, who is using the kidnapped tribesmen along with some mammoths to build pyramids. D'Leh and Tic’Tic sneak into the slave cages, and D’Leh learns that his father was killed trying to defend a slave. The party is spotted by the guards, who Tic'Tic kills before he succumbs to his wound. D'Leh and the tribesman infiltrate the civilization, and D'Leh starts a rebellion among the slaves, killing many of the Almighty's forces. However, Ka'Ren sacrifices himself as D'Leh eventually starts a stampede.
The Almighty threatens to kill Evolet if they do not abandon their rebellion. D'Leh feigns acceptance but easily kills the Almighty with the White Spear, breaking his illusion of godhood. During the ensuing battle, the warlord fatally wounds Evolet, who is then killed by D'Leh. He is devastated when Evolet dies in his arms, but her life is restored in exchange for Old Mother’s, who dies having fulfilled her final duty. With the Almighty dead and his civilization destroyed, the Yagahl bid the other tribes farewell and returned home with seeds collected by D’Leh’s father, given to them by the Naku to begin a new life.
Emmerich opened casting sessions in late October 2005.[3] 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.[4] Emmerich decided 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. The casting of unknown actors also helped keep the film's budget down.[5]
Production
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 the film Quest for Fire and the book Fingerprints of the Gods.[6] He invited composer Harald Kloser to help write the screenplay after he liked his story suggestions to The Day After Tomorrow.[7] 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 absence.[8] The script went through a second revision with Matthew Sand and a final revision with Robert Rodat.[4]
Production began in early 2006 in South Africa and Namibia.[4] Location filming also took place in southern New Zealand[9] and Thailand. Emmerich wanted to shoot the entire film in Africa but was barred from shooting a certain helicopter scene which led to them going to New Zealand for those shots.[10] 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.[5] Filming took place for a total of 102 days, 20 days longer than planned.[10]
Emmerich rejected making the film in an ancient language (similar to The Passion of the Christ or Apocalypto), deciding that it would not be as emotionally engaging.[11] Dialect coach Brendan Gunn was hired by Emmerich and Kloser to create "a half dozen" languages for the film.[12] Gunn has stated that he collaborated informally with film lead Steven Strait to improvise what the languages would sound like. He also used some local African languages and their dialects, including the Oshiwambo language native to Namibia, which can be heard faintly, spoken by the wise blind man.[13]
Alternate ending
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".
Visual and sound effects
The woolly mammoths in the movie were based on elephants and fossils of mammoths, while the saber-toothed cat was based on tigers and ligers (a lion/tiger hybrid).[14] The sounds made by the saber-toothed cat in the movie are based on the vocalization of tigers and lions.[15]
The film was a moderate success at the box office. In its opening weekend, the film grossed $35.8 million in 3,410 theaters in the United States and Canada, ranking No. 1 at the box office, and grossing over $22 million more than the film in second place, College Road Trip.[18][19] As of 29 April 2008[update], it has grossed approximately $268.6 million worldwide—$94.6 million in the United States and Canada and $174 million in other territories[20]—including $17.2 million in Mexico, $13.1 million in Spain, $11.3 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.[21]
Reception
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 10% of 147 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 3.4/10. The website's consensus reads: "prose prose prose..."[22]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 34 out of 100, based on 29 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable" reviews.[23]
Todd McCarthy of Variety wrote: "Conventional where it should be bold and mild where it should be wild, 10,000 BC reps a missed opportunity to present an imaginative vision of a prehistoric moment."[24]Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian wrote: "Roland Emmerich's great big CGI blockbuster lumbers along like one of the woolly mammoths that roam across the screen."[25] Caroline White, writing for The Times, noted that 10,000 BC is archaeologically inaccurate and contains many factual errors and anachronisms.[26]
The film was released on June 17, 2008, in single-disc editions on DVD and Blu-ray Disc in the United States. Best Buy released a 2-disc limited edition along with the DVD and Blu-ray Disc releases. It was released on July 1, 2008, in the United Kingdom.[28] The film grossed $31,341,721 in DVD sales, bringing its total film gross to $300,414,491.[29]
^Pamela McClintock (January 30, 2006). "Warners goes on time trek". Variety. Archived from the original on November 26, 2010. Retrieved August 20, 2006.
