10,000 B.C.

A lot of movies these days spawn video games (and vice versa). I have a feeling 10,000 BC should’ve skipped the movie stage and gone right to the video game. There are, as far as I can tell, no plans yet to adapt the film for Wii or PlayStation 3 or Xbox, but there should be. It’d probably be a fun quest game, with lots to enjoy and laugh at along the way.

You’d play as D’Leh, the brave mammoth hunter chosen by the fates to deliver his tribe from slavery at the hands of a technologically advanced warrior tribe. Your character would look like a white Rastafarian and sound like Steven Strait, so he’d be kind of wimpy and none too plausible as the game’s hero. You’d start by hunting a mammoth, of course, which is easier than you’d think: just hold a spear up and wait for the mammoth to charge at you. Realistically, you’d get stomped, as would happen in any decent movie, but that’s not going to happen this early in a video game.

Later, your sweetheart Evolet gets kidnapped by the evil warriors. In a good movie about prehistoric times, Evolet wouldn’t have eyeliner and look like Camilla Belle. But this is a video game, where female characters are frequently unrealistically gorgeous, shapely, and scantily clad. So Evolet is allowed to be as cute as a button, though all the other women in sight are rather dowdy. Following the progress of you and Evolet is an old wise woman named Old Mother. Every once in a while, there’s a cut scene in which she quivers and moans whenever things are going badly. You’ll want to hit the X button to skip past these scenes, of course. They serve only to interrupt the action.

Oh, yes, there’s action! You get to dodge phorusrhacids (or “terror birds”) and fight various warriors and get a saber-toothed tiger out of a trap. The tiger will, of course, return later and defend you from a suspicious African tribe, letting them know that you’re not just any hunter-gatherer; you’re down with sabertooths, man. So you join forces with them and other tribes who have seen their women and children kidnapped by the evil warriors, and together you journey to the warlord’s vast city. How vast? So vast, they need mammoths to help build it. This is ridiculous, of course, but it’s one of those goofy-fun video games (especially considering some of the dialogue), so you roll with it. If this were in a movie, you’d laugh it off the screen.

Eventually the big boss battle comes up, and this is where the game sort of punks out. All you have to do is throw a spear at the warlord. He dies. All of his followers freak out. You save the day. Evolet gets killed but not really, and you live happily ever after, at least until the next video game comes out. It’s a pretty linear and predictable storyline, but that’s what makes it a fun play, a good time-waster.

Video games aren’t movies, and movies aren’t video games; they’re separate media, which is why so many video games based on movies suck and why so many movies based on video games suck. A movie based on 10,000 BC, for instance, would be one of the stupidest and most boring films of the year.

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