10,000 BC

*** contains spoilers ***

My friend David said he wanted to watch a mindless film tonight, and by the end of the evening I had to agree that 10,000 BC certainly qualified.

We missed the very start, however this meant that I avoided seeing the cinema trailer for the upcoming new Doctor Who series, which was just as well, because I might only have got annoyed about the mis-spending of my licence fee on such publicity.

Alas, the other effect of missing the start is that it robbed me of being able to fairly criticise the film's thin characterisation, confused plot etc., which is great, because this means I get to be brief.

The CGI was excellent. I believed those crashing mammoths, and the sabre-tooth was great too. And it was shot partly in New Zealand!

Both the print and the neg from which it had been struck were seriously scratched in the first half.

The plot was extremely predictable. When the girl died at the end, it was obvious that she would come back to life again, even though there had been no magic in this world up to that point. Movies!

What I did find curious though was the story’s setting. Here we are in the twenty-first century, trying to imagine a past that we have no way of ever checking or correcting. It goes without saying that our guesses are very, very probably wrong.

Then along comes this film, making an equally good stab at imagining what our past might have been like, and people sagely ridicule it for ‘scientific inaccuracy.’

As you may know, I don’t believe either the evolution theory or this film’s one. I don’t believe that the earth even is 12,000 years old – any more than I believe that it will still be here in 12,000 years' time - because it’s plainly impossible for anyone to confirm such a theory.

Again – no matter how clever a scientific technique for calculating an ancient thing’s age, we still have no way of checking, even once. It’s all based on educated guesses. Rocks today, cells today, today’s version of everything comes from today.

Lately I’ve been reading alot of written records from 2-3,000 years ago (about 9-10,000 years after this film is set), and the worlds are fairly similar. (While the author might have lied, I still consider a written account from the time to be a bit weightier than trying to make it out from what atoms are doing millennia later)


From that perspective, it was quite illuminating to sit there watching huge panoramic shots of thousands of workmen building the pyramids, and suppose that King Solomon’s worksites (assuming that the account is true) may not have looked so different.