I disagree about 10,000 BC. I know it was silly and far from scientifically accurate, but I didn’t expect it to be otherwise. Those who deride it for being “historically inaccurate” are off the mark, though: by definition, history only goes back about 6,000 years, and what happened before that is open to speculation. If you accept that Homo sapiens has been around for at least 100,000 years, a lot of civilizations could have risen and fallen before ours. Archaeologists are coming up with weird new finds all the time, and there have indeed been books written on the subject.
Could humans have domesticated large animals now exinct? Maybe. Were climatic patterns different back then? Pretty sure they were. Was it possible to migrate from continent to continent on foot? Sometimes, yes.
Could humans have had contact with extraterrestrials who helped build monumental structures? I think most of the stuff presented on Ancient Aliens is utter crap, but I can’t deny the possibility entirely. We simply don’t know.
So long as audiences are willing to suspend disbelief entirely for fare like Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, I don’t see what the big deal over 10,000 BC is.
If you read my posts about 10,000 BC, I consistently say that I’m not objecting to its many sins against archaeology and paleontology. I keep saying that it’s Awesomely Bad because, even granting that background, the plot and the characters are unbelievably stupid.
Go read my last post about the Tiger Trap, for an example.
Here’s another:
The pseudo-Egyptian pyramid builders send their team of quasi Mongolian/Indian/what-the-hell-ever raiders to the winter-bound mountainous country of the pseudo-Cro-Magnon Mammoth Hunters in order to bring back slaves. To do so, they cross Diatryma-filled swamps, Smilodon-filled deserts*, and up into frozen mountains to kidnap the pseudo-Cro-Magnons as slaves.
What???
There wasn’t anybody closer to enslave? It was actually worth while going all that distance by foot and by ship (!!!) to bring back some highly resistant unwilling slaves, losing a few of your own people in the process to Diatrymas? These people must be DAMNED good slaves, once you break them. If I were a quasi-Egyptian god-king, I think I’d find it easier to simply enslave my raiders, if I couldn’t find anyone nearby for them to raid.
You don’t need to invoke the abuse of known history to pronounce this movie Awesomely Stupid. It manages to be incredibly stupid on its own terms. and it’s AWESOMELY stupid – it’s got expensive special effects out the wazoo, and an epic plot. It’s just a dumb epic plot.
*what the hell is the Smilodon doing wandering desert and quasi-veldt? Why isn’t it off killing diatrymas and other Big Game in the swamp? It must take a lot to keep that big carcass moving, and a couple of goats or antelopes of the size shown ain’t gonna do it.
Maybe it was because the Cro-Magnons had blue eyes, which was the hot new genetic mutation at the time.
Hell, I don’t exepect logic from this stuff. I just sit back and enjoy the show!
The Smilodon was AWESOME!!! He deserved a spot in the movie just because he was A SMILODON!!!
Hell, what do Gandolf et al. subsist on while they’re roaming the mountains of New Zealand (sorry, “Middle Earth”)? Who the feck cares? Just let them get on with their “quest” for the next three hours!
Lembas, of course.
Sorry, the movie 10,000 BC is awesomely stupid, and there’s not much that can remedy that. Logic and probability play no part in its makeup, not even a token effort in its direction. You can’t really say that about Lord of the Rings.
And I didn’t say it wasn’t enjoyable. I like watching it quite a bit. But that doesn’t blind me to the fact that it’s awesomely stupid.
Maybe it was all the hype about this movie but when I finally saw it I was neither scared or inspired. I was bored and that’s about the worst thing a movie can be.
I’d say, “Two true dudes in high school travel back in time and get Napoleon, Billy the Kid, So-crates, Freud, Ghengis Khan and Abe Lincoln and bring them back to the present for a history report and hilarity ensues. Also George Carlin is their time travel mentor.”
I haven’t yet had the, umm, gumption, to watch its sequels, but the first Jackass qualifies here if you consider it an actual movie. Which I guess I do.
I have to disagree about the original version. I love it. It was written by Anthony Shaffer, the same guy who wrote Sleuth and Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy (And brother of Peter, who wrote Equus and Amadeus). It starred Edward Woodward and Christopher Lee, fer cryin’ out loud (with Britt Eckland and horror vet Ingrid Pitt, for good measure. The film was almost diosemboweled and practically not released at all. That it finally made it to the screen is a wondr. It became a cult hit, and not because of Ms. Eckland’s dancing.
The remake, however, was a Truly Bad Movie. People involved with the original don’t even like to mention it. It’s also incredibly stupid. So I guess it fits in this thread.
The series in general. It’s been lampooned and widely criticized because it’s not great science fiction, but it’s awsome in my book. I thought of mentioning the Wicker Man, but the original was a rare look at modern pagans although stereotyped for the sake of the horror plot.
I’m not a big fan of the whole Planet of the Apes thing because it takes a pretty minor bit of satire (it’s been suggested that the French title would have been better translated as “Monkey Planet”) and managed to blow it up into not merely a major SF franchise, but one of the most long-lasting of them. As if this is what science fiction is about. Movie executives and TV executives reportedly asked filmmakers if they couldn’t maybe work apes into their upcoming projects, because they wanted to jump on the bandwagon. The damned thing not only spun off the original four sequels, there was a Marvel comic/magazine in the 1970s, then a TV series about 1980, then the Tim Burton movie, then the recent CGI films. Right from the start the films suffered from vast lapses in logic and common sense (The Statue of Liberty survives? With its incredibly thin shell of copper? Taylor encounters a planet full of English-speaking apes and doesn’t thin that’s odd? Their freakin’ spaceship crashes back on Earth!!!) and it only got worse as they tried to keep the thing going. (The sent another ship after the first? And it ended up killing all but one guy, and he’s in exactly the same place as the first one. Not merely the same planet, but crashes in the same place?) and worse (We blew up the Earth. What are we going to do for a sequel NOW?)
It’s all like the DC comics in the 1940s and 1050s – Julie found that if you stuck a gorilla on the cover, people would buy it. So your DC comics were filled with intelligent gorillas and people turning into gorillas and the like. (And they’re STILL DOING IT!) But, to tell the truth, I’d take Super Gorilla Grodd and his high-tech Ape City over any of the PLanet of the Apes films, any day.
I’m not so sure if this is a *stupid *movie, per se, but I nominate **Waterworld **with Kevin Costner. I don’t know, I like the aesthetic, and I’m not sure why it’s as big of a target as it is, compared to other silly action epics from the 80s-90s. In fact, the last time I watched it, I read that there is a fabled 4+ hour version floating around the Internet somewhere. I would totally watch that.
In the same vein, I also like the Robocop movies. God, are they stupid. But so much fun…that 80s grimy dystopian setting paired with all the tongue-in-cheek references (like the cheeky advertisements) can mitigate a lot of ham-fisted acting, wooden dialogue, etc.
I thought of mentioning the Wicker Man, but the original was a rare look at modern pagans although stereotyped for the sake of the horror plot.