Roland Emmerich's movies generally make a lot of money despite negative reviews. 10,000 BC appears to be no exception. A.O. Scott in the New York Times describes it as a "sublimely dunderheaded excursion into human prehistory." To Jan Stuart in Newsday, it's "an epic adventure of such towering testosterone counts and ceaseless tedium, you can almost feel the hair growing on your chest as the bags collect beneath your eyes." Similarly Claudia Puig remarks in USA Today, "The action is so plodding and the story so dreary that you feel as if you've lived through several millennia by the time it reaches its strained conclusion." Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post accuses Emmerich of taking "the time-honored Hollywood tradition of spectacle, overkill and narrative absurdity and manages to zap almost all the fun out of it." "Roland Emmerich enters a whole new tar pit of crapitude," Peter Howell scorns in the Toronto Star. But Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times may have nothing nice to say about the movie, but he expresses profuse admiration for Emmerich himself. "Outrageous and outlandish, Emmerich's 10,000 BC is easy to mock," he writes, "but it is so cheerfully shameless and terminally silly -- who knew that woolly mammoths were used to build the pyramids? -- that you have to admire its effrontery and accept its creator, the man behind Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, as a certified crackpot visionary."




07/03/2008