10,000 B.C: The Dawn of Civilization?
Just saw the trailer for the movie 10,000 B.C., the upcoming "historical epic" from the director of Independence Day, The Patriot and The Day After Tomorrow. Holy crap, does it ever look terrible, yet also awesome. It looks awesome in the way that The 13th Warrior was awesome, you know what I'm saying?
The plot: a handsome young mammoth hunter named D'Leh loses his girlfriend to a civilization of people who, for some reason or another, have figured out how to build megalithic structures 6,000 years before anyone else does. Now he has to journey to a distant land to rescue the woman he loves, fighting off a pack of sabre-toothed tigers along the way.
I predict that this movie will inspire the big pick-up line of 2008: "Baby, will you be the hunter to my gatherer?"
Yeah, I'm pretty sure they didn't have sailboats back then.
Presumably near the climax of the movie, D'Leh and his posse storm the ziggurat of the bad guys where the girl is being held. Compare to the Great Ziggurat at Ur, built in the 21st century B.C.
Hey, isn't that in Iraq? In fact, isn't it within the perimeter of a major U.S. airbase, Camp Addar?
I haven't seen the movie yet, but it seems suspiciously like a metaphor for the U.S. War on Terror, wrapped in an enigma, shrouded in a giant cliché. Coming from the guy who directed Independence Day and The Patriot, two of the most astoundingly pro-American films made in the history of cinema, can you really expect anything else?
Exhibit B:
Take a closer look at the ziggurat-storming scene. D'Leh is down in front, running heroically toward the impenetrable wall of bad guys. But check out his notably multicultural band of followers. You have the Indo-European mammoth hunters (red), the scantily-clad African bushmen (yellow), the vaguely Bedouin-looking guys with head cloths (blue), and a racially-indeterminate group of dark-skinned men with clay body paint (green).
Because fighting evil men with ziggurats isn't a white man's struggle, it's everyone in the world's problem and it has been since the beginning of history.
I can't wait for this to come out.
Link via ArchaeoBlog.
March 11, 2008 10:22 AM
mightygodking said:
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1.) The 13th Warrior was awesome because it was an honest-to-god Viking epic (with token "Arab") put onto film, so it's not nearly equivalent.
2.) There really wasn't a lot of pro-American anti-Arab imagery in the movie, sorry. The bad guys look Egyptian, old-school Egyptian. And the big bad guy is WHITE.