An Unintended Emmerich Trilogy? ID4, Stargate & 10,000 B.C....

My understanding was that ID4 was always meant to be a re-imagining of War of the Worlds. They even went so far as to mimic similar ship designs from previous incarnations and adapt the viral death concept to something more modern (computer virus).

 

That's possible. When Devlin wrote Stargate he intended for it to be a trilogy. I don't think that Stargate, Indepedence Day and 10,000 BC actually for a trilogy though.

 

Huh...funny you should post this, 2nd.

Around Christmas-time, after seeing the 10,000 BC trailer with I Am Legend, I posted to another forum (slightly paraphrased): "Looks like Emmerich finally got to make his StarGate sequel after all." (Devlin isn't involved in 10,000 BC to any extent, as far as I know.)

Don't know squat whether this'll even be any good, but the creature visual-effects look nice. The mammoth stampede looks at least two generations better than the crap Jackson tried to pull off in King Kong. They should have saved the time, and just adapted The Mammoth Hunters.

Movie takes place: 10,000 BC

Earliest form of English: 500 AD

Woolly mammoth went extinct: 12,000 BC

(Though I'll give anything with a prehistoric beast in it a watch. And yes, I've seen Raptor Island with Lorenzo Lamas.)

 

Are you INSANE? The Brontosaur stampede was awesome.

 

It looked 2-dimensional and flat to me.

 

I wish it was more sorta-stupid. Why not have cavemen and mammoths fight Egyptians riding velociraptors? And in the final scene, the cavemen can be saved by a bunch of Vikings who storm in, flying Harrier jump-jets.

I'm all for a good caveman flick, but I've been burned by Emmerich one too many times. He always lures me in with the concepts (excluding The Patriot), then screws me over. Still enjoy ID4, however, but mostly 'cause I want to live in a world where Pullman is President.

 

Agreed. If you're going to have a hugely expensive fx film like this why even try to pretend it's got some kind of historical context? Go all out with the cool-factor. Do something Edgar Rice Burroughs would have been proud of. Or, heck, just jump into the comic craze and make Shanna and Ka-Zar in the Savage Land: The Movie. Then you could have prehistoric beasties, cavemen, and evil industrialists!

 

Inspired by the posts I've quoted below, I re-watched the middle of Kong last night, and today I saw the trailer for 10,000 on the big screen. As much as a I like Kong, I have to admit that the brontosaur stampede is poorly integrated with the live-action characters, while similar scenes in 10,000 look fully realized and integrated. In terms of convincing focal plane, lighting, shadows, color and simple compositing of forms, 10,000 looks superior.

The jury is still out on whether it's a better all-around film... but it does look awesome.

 

I give Jackson credit for even attempting something so absurd. Yes it looked very fake, but it was a freaking huge dinosaur stampede, so it auto-wins just because.

The same goes for 10,000BC. No matter how stupid it will be (and it will be stupid), it almost gets a free pass just for being so over the top in idea and scope. It has to suck, but only because no such movie could be considered good in the traditional sense. It will be just like ID4, and The Day After Tomorrow: The most awesomely-bad movie that has ever existed; at least until we get another crazy-absurd special-effects cheese-fest.

This is exactly what I go to movies for anyway, so I'm more forgiving than others might be. I didn't even know I wanted to see woolly Mammoths trample the still-under-construction pyramids until I saw ads for this movie. I love the whole "first hero" angle as well. Again, this is what I want in a movie. Character and plot are fine, but I can get them done better in books and long-form television cinema. What I can't get from books and TV dramas are the visuals that go along with a movie like 10,000BC.

 

Well said, jangoisadrunk. Though I do think that excellent films of this type are possible (the first two LOTR films being fine examples), I don't think Emmerich is the guy to bring them to us. His movies tend to have all the realistic characterization of a primetime soap opera, and his concepts are frequently absurd, if entertaining. Still, 10,000 looks to be his best effort yet, and since I have a keen interest in both human prehistory and cheesy spectacle films, I'll be there on opening day to see how effectively Emmerich can weave them together.

 

I wasn't really counting the LotR because the source material gave PJ all he needed to make traditionally great movies.

 

Good point about the LotR source material, but I might counter that the events of recent prehistory, from what we can deduce from the evidence, offer some darn fascinating source material as well. Granted, before now the events of c. 10,000 BCE have never been shaped into a compelling narrative, but the data itself is there to draw from, and -- hopefully -- to mould into an awesome action/adventure film!

 

I agree about human pre-history being ripe for film adaptations, but I don't think 10,000 BC is a serious film because of the way the it seems to play fast and loose with the facts. If the film was trying to tell the story of the first human hero within the framework of what cutting edge science (or even cutting-edge fringe science) tells us about human society during the late stone age, then that would be different; however, I'm pretty sure mammoths were extinct by 10,000 BC, and AFAIK, not even the most fringe-residing scientist would suggest the pyramids are 12,000 years old. These two fact (which I could be totally wrong about, by the way) seem to place the movie squarely in the realm of B-movie land.

Either way, I have to see it.

 

Well, the wikipedia entry for mammoths says they lived "from the Pliocene epoch from 4.8 million years ago to around 4,500 years ago." So their presence in the film, at least, is plausible.

As to the pyramids, it's true that scholars tend to agree on a 2600-BCE date for the outside number of the structures' age, but according to some Discovery shows I've seen, there are a few reputable scientists who think the pyramids are older than that. It may be a wacky theory, but it's at least possible, and after all the more outre' ideas are what spectacle movies tend to be based on, rather than sober, irrefutable facts.

 

Well, I'm actually glad I was wrong about mammoths (it never occurred to me to look it up - duh).

And I'm more than willing to believe the pyramids are 12,000 years old for the sake of a movie.

 

These scientists wouldn't happen to go by the names of Daniel Jackson and Samantha Carter, would they?

 

[t'ealc]Indeed, Chancellor_Ewok.[/t'ealc]