This was one of those movies, purposely not screened for the critics in advance of its release last year. The movie industry is a vain, attention-hungry animal, and it never shies from the media spotlight without good reason. Occasionally a movie comes along so hobbled, so hackneyed, screening it for criticism becomes an open solicitation for capital-T, Trouble.
10,000 B.C. so desperately wants to join the ranks of films like One Million Years B.C. and Prehistoric Women it forgets why such movies sucked, committing many of the same mistakes. Watching it is the cinematic equivalent of sitting trapped behind two-way glass as a retarded child stumbles through a room full of open bear traps. One may shout, “No!” all one wants, to no avail. One will just loose one’s voice. {More}
If you have Showtime, you know the basics of Stargate. But just in case you don’t…After a brief prologue set in 8,000 B.c., we open in 1928. A team of archeologists working in Egypt uncover huge burial stones, ornately-carved with untranslatable hieroglyphs. And under the stones, they find something even more ornate and interesting…
Roger Ebert called this “an inheritor of the 1950s flying saucer genre”…though, for the life of me, I can only think of two films that match Independence Day‘s sheer destructive gluttony. The mid-90s will go down in history as a period shamefully infested with big-budget disaster orgies, horror pornography for middle Americans too chicken at watch real horror films.