The Blog

cant explain away the other crazy mash-ups, but re: the pyramids. i think Emmerich is still peddling the idea that ancient Egyptians came from space. the reference to Orion clearly shows Emmerich has read The Orion Mystery.

Were you expecting the daily life of Jericho? (That's what I would have hoped for, but not from Emmerich.) I haven't seen this film, but I've seen the trailer and you could see from that it was going to be a hoot. It looks like an updated (expensive) remake of One Million BC. It just needs a cameo from Raquel. Harryhausen said scholars don't go to the cinema. Why'd you go; was it assigned to you, or, a chance to set the record straight? I may watch it on video, like Apocalypto. It's a chance to see some fancy sets with guys in loincloths. In that one they were only off by a thousand years in their pyramid construction. Here, thanks to Graham Hancock's sticky Fingerprints Of The Gods, Emmerich is off by about seven thousand. Funny thing about Apocalypto, if Mel had listened to his collaborators and set the story in Central Mexico he would have avoided most of his anachronisms. No sense of history, no sense of geography, no sense.

That quote about Wenders is priceless. As for anachronisms, you're forgetting Camilla Belle; clearly homo sapiens would have required another 12,000 years of breeding to produce a face like hers. Does anyone remember anymore that she once shared the screen with Daniel Day-Lewis, in The Ballad of Jack and Rose? Does SHE remember?

DALE--what i'm wondering is why they settled on 10,000 b.c., and not 20,000 or 30,000 or 100,000 ... or, for that matter, why any specific b.c. date at all? * maybe averaging out anachronisms fore and aft yields 10,000 as a rough mean figure--though dino chickens skew that notion by at least 64 million years ... so we're probably stuck with the APOCALYPTO theory of "creative" appropriation: some reasonably nearby time frame so emmerich can recycle the same material again and no, it wasn't an assignment--just my curiosity is all, plus a fatal attraction to schlock

Is there a scene where Jesus rides a dinosaur? cause there should be. Creationists have a lot of money these days.

Pat, why 10,000 BC? Well in part it's the Neolithic Revolution. From reading the synopsis of the film I noticed that it ended with the main characters planting some seeds and watching them sprout. But as I suggested earlier it also seems to be the influence of Graham Hancock and, as Guo Shao-hua points out, the influence of his frequent collaborator, Robert Bauval, co-author of The Orion Mystery. These guys are a couple of psuedoanthropologists whose books and theories are ridiculously popular and appear to have been main sources of inspiration for several of Emmerich's films. It would seem that those pyramid builders in the story are none other than displaced Atlanteans who managed to escape before the poles shifted and their continent was encased in ice to become what we now know of as Antarctica. Hancock and Bauval give the date of this polar shift as being roughly 10,500 BC. Of course none of their nonsense could explain Emmerich's childish understanding of geography and ecology or his miraculous resurrection of long extinct species.

DALE--hmmm, displaced atlanteans ... which explains that glimpse of a world map (or was i just hallucinating?) with the iberian peninsula clearly contoured on it: no "there be monsters" here also re APOCALYPTO: my own mea culpa for that "reasonably nearby time frame" nonsense, as howlingly anachronistic as any of the gaffes i mentioned in the post--simply forgot the last scene in the film, which leaves any claim to historical veracity in tatters * but whichever way you slice it, it's closer to our OWN century/millennium than emmerich's

Pat, I can't say whether or not you were hallucinating, not having seen the film, though I suspect some substance with hallucinatory properties might help in the digestion of hancock, Bauval and Emmerich's strange brew. I can say that some old maps do figure as key pieces of 'evidence' in Hancock's claims, so I wouldn't be suprised to see one passed around in 10,000 BC. By the way, it seems Emmerich's next project will deal with the Maya prophecy of the earth's destruction in 2012. The title is said to be 2012 AD. A pattern seems to be emerging. So it appears we all have something big to look forward to. As for M. Gibson and His Maya Epic, legitimate Mayanists have pretty thoroughly dismantled that entertainment machine and I don't think we need to redo their work here. My big problem with this film is how it functions as apology and justification for the horrors of the Spanish Conquest, which far too many Mayas are willing to accept as faithful Christians. The sad thing is that several of my Maya friends thought the film was an acurate reflection of their cultural history. Pretty scary, much scarier than all of the contrived thrills in the film. Their major gripe with Apocalypto was Gibson casting non-Mayas in most of the speaking parts: though they are speaking Yucatec Mayan it's obvious they learned their lines phonetically and have no idea what they're saying. Any way, thanks for the chance to vent.

Why is this stupid movie even being blogged about? It sounds like an obvious piece of flaming shit. Why does it even deserve comment? Why do so many pseudo-intellectual film critics feel the need to blow their spunk on the most idiotic Hollywood crap? Oh yeah, it's a "parlor game"...for effete dumb fucks with no life.

CF, I'll do my best to answer your questions, though I can't speak for other psuedo-intellectuals, I'm not a film critic, I'm an artist, a painter and a writer, with a serious interest in films, both good and bad. I think much can be learned from examining certain bad fims. As my last comment was meant to suggest such anti-historical films in historical garb as the two we were discussing can lead to a great deal of confusion regarding basic matters like history and geography in the diverse quarters of the film-going public. I was trying to get at the roots of the misunderstanding and it was intended as a friendly discussion. It strikes me that your third question shows considerable contempt for orgasm and pleasure in general, but let me assure you that for me it goes far beyond the simple thrill of shooting ducks in a barrel. People come to films with many different expectations and I try to take those other perspectives into account, such as those of my house-mate and his friends from the Yucatan. As a side note, I have to say your last sentence really took me back. Parlor Game was the name of the first play I wrote some thirty-five years ago, back in high school. It ended with a young lady dropping a bookcase full of heavy old volumes on her sharp-tongued lover. Thanks for your cutting remarks, as an impoverished old artist, I no doubt needed the check.

CF--re "sounds like an obvious piece of flaming shit": but you don't know that, do you ... and how will you find out? plus, as with the fitfully engaging michael bay, at very least the baz luhrmann of CGI action genre, i like keeping career tabs on emmerich, or at least have till now--e.g., a "friend" of wim wenders: mightn't something come of that, if only as "creative" antithesis, a commercial "anti-wenders" at work? * plus, per J.R. JONES, the opening quote indeed is "priceless"--aren't we all the richer for its being shared?

I found the title of this blog slightly misleading, as I thought you'd actually be writing about 'What time is it there?' by Ming-liang Tsai. (A very good film by the way - watch it!) But alas, it's about 10.000 BC, which I refuse to watch!

Dinosaur chickens = Terror birds http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_bird Not saying they aren't anachronistic temporally and geographically. Just saying they are real birds that lived after the dinosaurs went extinct.