Sabretooth Tiger and Mammoths delight, but why the narration? ** Two Stars

By Robin Rowe

HOLLYWOOD, CA (Hollywood Today) 3/7/08 – “At the heart of the film is also a powerful human story,” says Camilla Belle who plays Evolet, the clan princess in 10,000 B.C. “These two people, D’Leh and Evolet, are torn away from each other, and then have to find each other again, in the midst of this amazing journey. It’s really an escape into another world.” Belle looks like Elizabeth Taylor in her prime and as with Cleopatra makes a worthy prize. Accidentally courageous D’Leh seeks the backbone to pursue and free her when she’s carried off.

The visual effects are marvelous, particularly the scene of the saber-toothed tiger in the water. Visual effects supervisor Karen Goulekas joined ’10,000 B.C.’ two years before start of principal photography, after working with the director Roland Emmerich on ‘Godzilla’ and ‘The Day After Tomorrow’. Goulekas built a library of illustrations, photos and CG images from television shows as references for the film’s creatures. She visited the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles to research on mammoths. At the Tala Game Reserve in Durban, South Africa, she shot HD footage of lions, tigers, leopards, elephants and ostriches. The images she gathered enabled the animators to study real animal movements from different angles.

The terror birds in the film are flightless predators with huge beaks based on creatures that existed in South America. “They were gigantic,” says Goulekas. “We know how fast an ostrich can run and how much damage it can do with its powerful feet, and combined that knowledge with the fact that there is a direct link between the terror birds and the dinosaurs. We based their look on a hybrid of different illustrations.”

During production, Goulekas and her team joined the actors and on-set crew armed with measuring sticks, flags and other objects painted blue, to eventually be replaced by moving digital creatures. “For the terror birds sequence, we had a blue terror bird head on the end of a stick, so that as we were framing up, we could visualize it,” says Goulekas. “For the tiger sequence, we had a full size tiger mapped on a flag which we could just walk across the frame. If you don’t get the framing right, it’ll burn you later. With the height stick, the actor can see where he’s looking, and then the director can shoot whatever he wants.”

Once the designs of the creatures were finalized, her team of 18, including character animators and asset makers, then began pre-visualization (previs), an animated 3-D storyboard of all the effects sequences. “For example, for a scene in which D’Leh walks through the tiger gorge, we built a 3-D environment of the gorge and the artist then animated the tiger jumping down from a bird’s eye view of the scene, as a means of blocking the action,” says Goulekas. “Then we put in some camera angles and, with our previs editor, Steve Pang, and the previs supervisors, we looked at all the cuts and discussed what needed to be done with the individual artists.” The previs became an invaluable tool on-set for cast and crew alike.

“I always showed the actors the previews before we set up a scene so they would know the big picture of what was going on around them,” says director Emmerich, who wanted to tell a story about a hero who emerges from an isolated tribe to challenge an empire. “I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of classic storytelling, in the timeless way people have told stories round the campfire for generations.” Production went from the snowy cold of New Zealand winter, to the hot,humid climate of Cape Town, South Africa, to the arid desert landscape of Namibia.

“There’s something very beautiful about how the human condition hasn’t really changed over the millennia,” says Steven Strait who plays the young warrior D’Leh. “What makes us human beings hasn’t changed since pre-historic times: love, compassion, conscience, sympathy. You see all of these things in this film.” Cliff Curtis, who plays Tic‘Tic, says, “There are predatory terror birds and saber-tooth tigers, and, of course, the mammoths, but the story also has a spiritual undertone to it, and I think that is the glue that holds it together.”

Unfortunately, that spiritual undertone is spoken out loud as lispy narration by Omar Sharrif. Emmerich, known for directing such action films as ‘Independence Day’ and ‘The Day After Tomorrow’, relies heavily on narration in ’10,000 B.C.’ If you can imagine ‘Independence Day’ with a narrator explaining everything about Will Smith, you understand what went wrong with ’10,000 B.C.’ The first twenty minutes of the film is mostly narrated exposition and could easily be dropped. Just get to the creatures already!

The pre-historic men, with their unkempt beards and dirty faces, look unflatteringly like the Geico caveman. Camilla Belle, on the other hand, looks hot. However, nothing in costumes (or better still lack of costumes) exposes any of her charms. Belle stays fully clothed, spending her screen time on sultry pouting and pining to be rescued. She could have done so much more. With Omar Sharrif narrating as D’Leh goes in circles in the desert it’s hard not to think of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. ’10,000 B.C.’ seems to borrow from many films. At times it seems to be reaching for ‘Narnia’, but fails to utilize its hero cat. Disappointingly little is seen of the saber-toothed tiger.

Distributor: Warner Bros.

Release date: March 7th, 2008

Duration: 1:55

Rated PG-13 for sequences of intense action and violence.

Robin Rowe is a co-founder of ScreenPlayLab (www.screenplaylab.com).