10,000 B.C. - Review

When he’s not making big-budget, empty-headed blockbusters I have no idea where Roland Emmerich’s movie watching tastes lay. But I can think of at least five movies which I know he’s seen, since his new movie 10,000 B.C. takes them, grinds them up into a paste, and spreads them liberally across the screen. Emmerich’s script is a rehash of Apocalypto, with a dash of The Ten Commandments and 300 thrown in. His production design borrows liberally from Lord of the Rings, and his villains were lifted straight out of Stargate and plopped down in the middle of a brand new desert. All five of those movies are good on their own, but when they’re ripped off by Emmerich in one sprawling epic; the result is a tedious bore in which grubby people stand around muttering in a variety of badly chosen accents.

It starts with a primitive mountain village where generation after generation has subsisted by hunting the great mammock. The great mammock looks a lot like a wooly mammoth, I guess 10,000 years ago they hadn’t invented the “th” sound yet. Luckily, they have invented the rest of the English language and so our caveman characters speak in lovely, strangely accented American. There’s a lot of prophecy mumbo jumbo at the outset, which feels as if it drags on for at least the length of the Mesozoic age, until finally we get to the story. Strange men on horses kidnap half the village and run off with them. The three remaining hunters set off on foot to save their kidnapped friends, and along the way encounter mud and vicious proto-Egyptians.

D’Leh (Steven Strait) is our hero, a glassy-eyed primitive from a race of people with an affinity for not bathing and wearing bad Rasta-wigs. I saw no sign of the herb, but if they were smoking it, that might help explain the movie’s downright lethargic, disinterested pace. D’Leh drifts across the countryside in pursuit of his girlfriend and his people, and whenever there’s a problem the movie invents another random prophecy spouted by an aged oracle to solve whatever corner the plot has managed to paint itself into. At one point they quite literally dig a wise man up out of the ground to give the movie its next, much needed MacGuffin.

I will say one thing for 10,000 B.C.: the special effects aren’t as bad as they look in the trailer. Or maybe I simply didn’t notice them, since almost all of the movie’s big special effects are actually in the trailer. If you’ve watched any advertisements for the film, you’ve already seen nearly all of the excitement it has in its bag of tricks. Between the ten seconds of running mammoths and growling saber-toothed tigers 10,000 B.C. has nothing to offer but a lot of wandering around in the mud and guys thrusting spears into things off camera. Well maybe that’s not quite fair. There is a scene in the middle where everyone plays Honey I Shrunk the Kid as they run around in the midst of oversized blades of grass being eaten by giant, squawking turkey vultures. But other than that it’s a lot of half naked, grungy Rastafarian primitives standing around holding spears and trying to figure out which prophesy to follow next. Here’s a prophecy for you: You’ll hate this movie. See something else.

Sunshine - Review

Stunning set pieces do not a movie make. Case in point: Danny Boyle's Sunshine, a heady, often spellbinding science fiction thriller that jettisons dramatic credibility in its sketchily conceived and executed third act. Overly solemn and weighted down with portentousness, Boyle's disappointing follow-up to the ebullient charmer Millions (2005) has neither the jazzy energy nor the full-throttle narrative drive that distinguishes his best films, like Trainspotting (1996) and 28 Days Later (2003). That Boyle and his co-screenwriter Alex Garland ultimately take such an ill-advised narrative detour into contrivance is mystifying, for Sunshine clearly had the potential to be a classic of the science fiction film genre, as gripping as it is provocative.

The basic concept of Sunshine glimmers with promise. Fifty years from now, our sun is dying. Unless the eight-member crew of the aptly named Icarus II can reignite the sun by detonating a massive, nuclear device in its interior, all life on Earth will perish. Led by the stalwart Captain Kaneda (Hiroyuki Sanada), the Icarus II crew members embark on what may be a suicide mission; seven years earlier, the Icarus I vanished before reaching its target. Although Capa (Cillian Murphy), the Icarus II physicist, attempts to safeguard against disaster by calculating the ever-shifting risk-assessment of the mission, neither he nor anyone else could have anticipated that they'd pick up a faint distress signal from the Icarus I.

Overriding the objections of Mace (Chris Evans), the crew's volatile engineer, Kaneda orders Cassie (Rose Byrne), the mission pilot, to rendezvous with the long-lost ship in search of survivors. Almost immediately, however, calamity strikes the Icarus II, due to an oversight by Trey (Benedict Wong), the sleep-deprived navigator. Despite this near-fatal setback, the crippled Icarus II continues on course for its predecessor, where the increasingly embattled crew encounters an unexpected threat-not just to the mission, but their very survival.

In a recent New York Times article, Boyle and Garland expressed their desire to make Sunshine "a head trip," closer in tone to metaphysical-themed science fiction films like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Solaris (1972) than escapist, special effects extravaganzas in the Star Wars (1977) mold. To a degree, Boyle and Garland succeed, for there's a crypto-religious undercurrent to Sunshine that becomes more pronounced in the film's second half, when a character's religious-fueled mania provides the dramatic catalyst for the film's descent into bloody violence. It's a potent conceit that might have worked if the filmmakers hadn't introduced it so clumsily into their narrative, which effectively degenerates into an outer space version of a "slasher" flick, albeit one that flirts with profundity.

Sunshine is also an atypically humorless entry from Boyle, who's never made a film this oddly devoid of personality. The crew of the Icarus II—Cliff Curtis, Troy Garity, and Michelle Yeoh round out the underutilized cast—are little more than ciphers, adding to the body count. As a result, you don't form much of an emotional attachment to any of them, even as some of them meet their demise in spectacular, nerve-fraying scenes that confirms Boyle's flair for viscerally-charged imagery that's both disturbing and mesmerizing. Indeed, there are so many arresting scenes in Sunshine that it's all the more disappointing that Boyle's latest film sadly turns out to be less than the sum of its dazzling parts.