10,000 BeeeeeSeeeee

Perhaps the movie came out as something out of the ordinary. The scenes in the trailer are larger than life. It was 10,000 BC. The time when agriculture rose up, as anthropologists would say. Why was this significant? Because anthropologist Jared Diamond said that agriculture caused humans to leave their nomadic life and began to settle down beside the rivers and seas, and with that, they began to build cities. Within these cities, it brought down division of classes and the beginning of humans treating other humans as slaves (thus, the film depicts ‘four-legged demons’ as conquerors from an unknown civilization). And so anthropologists would bash at agriculture every now and then, blaming it on what they deemed as the demise of the human race.

In the film, I do think the film-makers of the movie made it a big deal as to make a “hero’s journey” out of it. If you know Joseph Campbell, who said that all myths are similar by structure, the hero’s journey (hero meeting a mentor, him crossing the threshold, beginning the journey, defeating the enemy, and getting back home) is perhaps the most recurring of these. And true enough, the director may have thought to fused it to the movie, include some prehistoric saber-tooth tigers then and there, and include an ‘Old Mother’ as the mentor figure for our prehistoric hero.

What made it funny (yes, all of us in Decode were laughing at it) was that it was so ridiculous in that it tried too hard to make that ‘hero’s journey’ completely fused in the storyline. What happened was a scattered fragments of some ‘prophecies’ on different races (it’s kinda like a small United Nations in Pre-history) that the hero was entitled to fulfill. In the end, it felt like the fitting of the prophecies’ fulfillment were forced, andas a result, not at all believable in the movie.
Assessing from the view of a simple movie-watcher and an anthropologist, both would cower at the movie’s attempt. It romanticized too much the coming up of ‘agriculture’ as a means of living. The series of fragmented prophecies in different cultures and peoples and how the film-makers ‘forced’ them up seemed ridiculous enough. In the end, it tried so hard to make it like Lord of the Rings but ended up as weird as some character in the film who pops out of nowhere and began to be the ‘universal translator’ for all the peoples without explaining why he came about with such an ability (like I said, it’s like a mini-United Nations). Maybe the filmmakers thought that a crafting of an epic just involves visual effects. As long as it doesn’t have a story, a believable story, it won’t have impact on the audience.

In the end, the Old Mother can be allegorized as having watched the whole film, ended up with a nose-bleed, and died. In fact it’s like she did so, because she felt all the hurts and pains of the hero D’leh and his woman, Evolet, like a person who watches the whole movie and sympathizes with the protagonists. So what if the saber-tooth tiger stopped and didn’t eat him? So what if a Mammoth suddenly stopped on its tracks and faced Evorlet to make her well? These could have worked if there was consistency in those prophecies and storylines. It seems like these plots were just made and mixed together without considering coherence for the hero’s ’supposed’ journey. Fitting one storyline into another made it a series of gibberish stories that made up one crappy movie.

Perhaps the only saving moment for the whole film is when Tic’Tic recounted to D’leh what the hero’s father had done for him:

“A good man draws a circle around him, and in it he cares for his family, his wife and children. A great man draws a larger circle including his brothers, his friends, and protects them as he would his family. But then there is the rare man who has a special destiny. His circle extends beyond boundaries to include the world of innocents who lack the will to defend themselves.”

This is resplend3nt. 10,000 BC has been decoded.

-resplend3nt