(2008, 109 min) There's no doubt that Roland Emmerich knows how to deliver a spectacle. Independence Day brings massive destruction, neat aliens and snappy wisecracking together so skillfully that, over a decade later, we take its craftsmanship for granted. Maybe Emmerich takes it for granted too, as he now seems to be running on fumes, cribbing liberally from past epics and slapping it together in a most perfunctory way. It's enough to remind you that Emmerich also brought us the remake of Godzilla.
Our reluctant hero is D'Leh (Steven Strait), an orphaned mountain tribesman who falls for a blue-eyed girl (Camilla Belle). She tells of four-legged demons who ransacked her town, and are eventually coming to get them as well. Unfortunately for us, these demons are merely Mongol-shaded despots, enslaving people to create a prototypical Mayan empire. For an ad campaign that focuses on wooly mammoths, saber-toothed tigers and vicious giant emus, it's distressing that not only are these the only creatures who appear in the movie, but their total screen time is somewhere under 10 minutes. That leaves a lot of time to think about other films that did this stuff better, from Mayan adventure (Apocalypto) to slave rebellions (Ben-Hur) to tribal war (Braveheart). Emmerich may think he's being clever by including specific visual references to these films (as well as Alien), but he's only making 10,000 B.C. look even more like a B-movie in comparison.
© TLA Entertainment Group
No comments:
Post a Comment