We have been waiting a looo-hoooong time to see something of 10,000 B.C., Roland Emmerich's movie about the days when Joan Rivers still had her original face. After numerous delays (it was originally slated to come out this summer) it finally finished shooting last year. Since then, nothing. Until now. The teaser has just gone online here offering the world a peak at the Ice Age as seen through the eyes of the man who brought us Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, which were both amazing in parts, though you tut. And was it worth waiting for? In the words of many a character throughout the entire run of Friends: ya-HA! Look at all the stampeding ancient creatures!
Seeing this trailer without the benefit of prior plot knowledge would lead us to assume that it's the story of a plucky, little mammoth (we'll call him Stampy) who dreams of nothing more than winning the annual Cross-Country Hairy-Elephant Lollop and showing those big-tusked bully mammoths that it's the size of your spirit, not your trunk, that matters. But, slightly alas, it is the tale of a tribal hunter (Steven Strait) who ventures into unknown territory in order to find a new home for his lady wife (Camilla Belle) and dying tribe. Because this is a big-ass blockbuster movie, on the way he encounters saber-toothed tigers, a big weird bird thing and more mammoth (mammoths? mammii?) than a month of Walking With Beasts re-runs.
Now, our historical knowledge really only stretches as far back as the times when mobile phones were really huge, but it seems there are some factual wrongs in this movie. Around 10,000 B.C. – and let's allow for a margin of error of a few decades here, what with limited photography and Wikipedia entries at the time – whatever humanoid creatures were around at the time certainly didn't look like that smooth, cute girl from When A Stranger Calls. Mammoth were also basically kaput. And ILM definitely hadn't been invented. So, this should not be used as the basis for any respectable curriculum. But a factually accurate movie about one big lump of ice sliding after another big lump of ice would be far less dynamic. We'll take sketchy history with oodles of hairy pachyderms any day.