Here's a fact: apparently, when companies put added bonuses like Omgea-3 in juice, they are also taking something out like calcium or other vitamins. The moral: what might originally appear to be helpful on the surface, really doesn’t gain a person anything in the long run.
The same logic could apply to the use of computer generated effects in filmmaking: they allow filmmakers to show audiences things that have never before been possible, while, in some cases, losing an essential human element: authenticity. That seems to be the case with Roland Emmerich’s new film 10,000 BC: its chalk full of special effects, and is basically nonsense.
10,000 BC - The Story
It revolves around a young native warrior named D’Leh played by a dirtied and dreadlocked Steven Strait, who was so bad in last year’s The Covenant that it’s no wonder he is barely recognizable here. D’Leh ventures towards civilization with a group of fellow warriors after their village is attacked by savages who take hostages, among whom are, yes, D’Leh’s girl. They are guided by Old Mother, the village elder who has the unfortunate narrative task of watching over them vicariously with her magic powers. What a convenient trick.
The Monotinty of Computer Generated Battle
Along the journey, that somehow miraculously takes place on foot, atop snow-covered mountains, in a jungle and across a desert, with not one single warrior suffering exhaustion or dehydration, the warriors do battle, not only with the villains, but with computer generated mammoths, computer generated tigers, and in one scene, computer generated beasts that look like a cross between a turkey, a dinosaur and that thing from Cloverfield.
To sweeten the pot, there is also a scene in which D’Leh accidently falls into a pit of spikes while casing a herd of computer generated dear, miraculously missing every one of them on the way down. Lucky break.
Aopocalypto Lite?
If this plot sounds a little familiar, that’s because its outlines have basically been lifted from Mel Gibson’s underrated, computer generated effectsless (or so it would seem) film Apocalypto in which a Mayan warrior must venture off into civilization in order to rescue his fellow villagers who have been captured as sacrifices to the gods who have cast a plague upon the land.
To see Apocaplypto, is to see exactly every step that 10,000 BC takes wrong. Because the film is so glossy, so flashy, so jammed with effects and battle sequences, one feels disoriented within the journey to civilization. There is no temporal link between scenes that switch from mountaintops, to jungles, to deserts, travelling millions of miles over the span of a single cut.
Even individual sequences fail to provide consistent human action. D’Leh begins to climb out of the pit he has fallen into and then cut to him out and on his way. Where is the drama in that?
A Shell Without a Heart
Thus, Emmerich has cut out the true essentials necessary in order to make audiences care about this journey even on the most rudimentary level; to feel the hardship of it, see the physical strain it has on the body, the mind and the endurance of the soul. The plot is no more than a collection of unrelated, irrational episodes that jump from one intense battle or obstacle to the next without a single motive to care about. The film is all veneer and varnish.
The CGI Dilemma
Therein was the essence of Apocalypto’s success and the problem with computer generated effects. Apocalypto, by taking a handheld camera into the jungle, by having (seemingly?) real jaguars and quicksand, put the audience in direct contact with the physical dangers of Jaguar Paw’s journey, which, on top of that, possessed symbolic significance in its attempts to keep the traditions of the village people alive by trying to keep the village structure itself alive.
And when the camera pulled back for a long shot of a sweeping jungle vista, the audience pulled back too and admired its exotic beauty. When when there's an extreme long shot of a sweeping vista in 10,000 BC it can’t be admired it because of its artificiality. The effect draws attention to itself.
A Meditation on Film Criticism
One must still question if it is fair practice to view 10,000 BC as a failure in light of Apocalypto’s undeniable success, especially when one strives to provide a comment on society and people’s relation to social power, and the other to be a rousing special effects action film.
However, it seems acceptable to think that a film has used the time one puts into it to show or teach its viewer something new, to dazzle, or at least leave them with even the simplest thought, feeling or physical sensation. 10,000 BC fails to exist below the surface, never once stimulating the most basic human levels of sensation: the intellectual or the emotional.
Therefore, the criticism stands. At the end of the day, when walking into a video store and seeing Apocalypto to the right and 10,000 BC to the left, the decision on which one to get should be, like 10,000 BC itself, a no-brainer.
