10,000 B.C.
Mar. 23rd, 2008 12:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragoness_eGot home, bug-bombed the house, and went out to see a movie while the house fumigated. "10,000 BC" was playing at about the right time, so we went to watch it.
It was quite good. It's also very much a story straight out of Edgar Rice Burroughs; not just a Lost World Romance, but one with many elements specific to Burroughs. The director/screenwriter has admitted Robert E. Howard as an influence, but the movie has much more of an ERB feel than a Howard one.
The plot could have been ripped straight from any of many, many Burroughs novels, though it does not seem to be any specific ones. The elements are there: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, girl is kidnapped by villains and carried away to decadent "lost" civilization (or in this case, brand new decadent civilization), boy does awesome heroic deeds in his efforts to find his girl again, hero and villains both get to battle savage beasts in the wilderness, villain-character falls in lust with girl and protects her from his cronies long enough for hero to rescue her still intact at the climax, fierce but wholesome barbarian hero leads loyal warriors and oppressed slaves in revolt against decadent civilized overlords, boy finally finds girl at the very end, the bad guys are bad and the good guys are good....
Also typically Burroughs is the discreetly PG nature of the violence and threats. The captured heroine is not raped or even explicitly threatened with rape, (heck, we're not sure people in this movie have sex, but the kids must have come from somewhere...) the movie avoids graphic torture or gratuitous violence; almost all deaths are significant (except maybe the bad guy extras that get trampled in the mammoth stampede), and the bad guys die at the end.
One other thing occurred to me while watching this movie: if "The Almighty"'s name had turned out to be Ra, and the gold pyramidion capping one of the pyramids had been replaced with a certain gigantic golden ring, this movie could very well have been the Stargate prequel about the original revolt that overthrew Supreme System Lord Ra and led to the burying of Earth's Stargate.
The fact that the Director/Co-Screenwriter of this movie (Roland Emmerich) was also the Director/Co-Screenwriter of the original "Stargate" movie sort of supports this hypothesis.
Naturally, most critics panned this movie. On skimming their reviews, I noticed that not one critic actually understood what kind of movie they were watching (a Burroughsian Lost World Romance), though some of the small handful that gave it good reviews almost got it. The movie is not "historically accurate". Of course not! It's not that kind of movie. Complaining that "10,000 BC" isn't historically accurate is like complaining that Godzilla isn't a realistic dinosaur.
Then there were the critics who were so ignorant, they not only didn't know the genre of the movie they were watching, but they didn't know what they were seeing on screen. Contrary to one reviewer's comments, there was not one Neanderthal or dinosaur to be seen in the movie.
It was quite good. It's also very much a story straight out of Edgar Rice Burroughs; not just a Lost World Romance, but one with many elements specific to Burroughs. The director/screenwriter has admitted Robert E. Howard as an influence, but the movie has much more of an ERB feel than a Howard one.
The plot could have been ripped straight from any of many, many Burroughs novels, though it does not seem to be any specific ones. The elements are there: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, girl is kidnapped by villains and carried away to decadent "lost" civilization (or in this case, brand new decadent civilization), boy does awesome heroic deeds in his efforts to find his girl again, hero and villains both get to battle savage beasts in the wilderness, villain-character falls in lust with girl and protects her from his cronies long enough for hero to rescue her still intact at the climax, fierce but wholesome barbarian hero leads loyal warriors and oppressed slaves in revolt against decadent civilized overlords, boy finally finds girl at the very end, the bad guys are bad and the good guys are good....
Also typically Burroughs is the discreetly PG nature of the violence and threats. The captured heroine is not raped or even explicitly threatened with rape, (heck, we're not sure people in this movie have sex, but the kids must have come from somewhere...) the movie avoids graphic torture or gratuitous violence; almost all deaths are significant (except maybe the bad guy extras that get trampled in the mammoth stampede), and the bad guys die at the end.
One other thing occurred to me while watching this movie: if "The Almighty"'s name had turned out to be Ra, and the gold pyramidion capping one of the pyramids had been replaced with a certain gigantic golden ring, this movie could very well have been the Stargate prequel about the original revolt that overthrew Supreme System Lord Ra and led to the burying of Earth's Stargate.
The fact that the Director/Co-Screenwriter of this movie (Roland Emmerich) was also the Director/Co-Screenwriter of the original "Stargate" movie sort of supports this hypothesis.
Naturally, most critics panned this movie. On skimming their reviews, I noticed that not one critic actually understood what kind of movie they were watching (a Burroughsian Lost World Romance), though some of the small handful that gave it good reviews almost got it. The movie is not "historically accurate". Of course not! It's not that kind of movie. Complaining that "10,000 BC" isn't historically accurate is like complaining that Godzilla isn't a realistic dinosaur.
Then there were the critics who were so ignorant, they not only didn't know the genre of the movie they were watching, but they didn't know what they were seeing on screen. Contrary to one reviewer's comments, there was not one Neanderthal or dinosaur to be seen in the movie.
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Date: 2008-03-23 11:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-28 05:37 am (UTC)i found your dbz 'fics a long, loooong time ago [1999-ish, when i was like what? 11?] and they remain a good read for me, long after my dbz phase. of course i'd still watch it, lol.
i was kind of worried today because your sites don't seem to be showing up anymore, but i found your ff.net stuff. so please don't take it off! i love to read them, even the old ones. :]