10,000 B.C. is about a prehistoric/early historic society and the quest of a early human to save his love and free slaves. It has mammoths, sabre toothed cats, emus, etc. 10 Million B.C. on the other hand is about time travel from modern day, dinosaurs, and a rescue mission to find Michael Gross's brother. Well the character Michael Gross plays anyway. Michael Gross played Burt Gummer in almost every entry into the Tremor's movie series as well as the television series. He is by far the highlight of this movie.
I'll touch on the positives before the negatives. This movie plays itself seriously for the most part (where ALvZ didn't). The dialogue and acting on Michael Gross' part was done pretty well. I actually found myself lost in some of the relationships he had with the 1950's people he was rescuing. Oh yeah, in 1949, he was running a Philadelphia Project-like experiment, but instead of invisibility or teleportation, they stumbled onto time travel. The time travel is hard to pull off due to the location of the Earth's rotation changing. This is an interesting concept I've never seen put into a movie, but this leads to people being fused into objects. All of these things make the first half of the movie not completely bad.
Then everything starts to fall apart. About 2/3 of the way through Gross is gone and the 1949 cast are now the main characters. The dialogue of the past cast is contemporary, which is a major oversight. Captain America doesn't talk like we do, he doesn't use the term hot to mean attractive, etc. The women are dressed in skimpy outfits for sex appeal, but in a survival situation, that's just dumb. Keep in mind this is the lady that stayed alive in a dinosaur infected forest for 6 years. The acting is hit and miss... and a lot of miss when Gross isn't around. The plot takes a bunch of unneeded or nonsensical turns that mostly involve running from the t-rex named Big Red. They chase the dinosaur, it chases them in the city... oh yeah the dinosaur gets teleported into present day.
That leads to the next point, the dinosaurs. Jurassic Park is one of my favorite movies, so anything with dinosaurs in it, I automatically get interested in. It's Sci-Fi original crap CG in this movie though. Some of it is done in quick spurts, which is more effective. I was hoping for some sort of practical effect somewhere, but then it happened, dinosaur models/practical effects... and I wanted the CG back. There were a few instances of practical effects. The best one was a dead pterodactyl, it was passable. Then there was a alligator of some sort that didn't move. The camera just shook around to give it an aura of life, which wasn't convincing at all. Then there's the raptor. It had no articulation, it just got stabbed and spun in a circle.
The most annoying CG effects was Big Red. This was the dinosaur that you see the most of. It looks nothing like the cover above. The cover makes him look as big as Godzilla, but he is as indestructible. They shoot him like a hundred times with no effect (the shooting isn't all that convincing either). A dinosaur wouldn't be indestructible to a minigun, come on. The CG looks bad, but it doesn't help that Big Red eats people with one bite like 12 times... literally. I'm not talking about like in Jurassic Park where the T-Rex picks the lawyer up and chomps him down in like ten seconds. I mean a bite and he walks on with no trace of the person.
Is it so bad that it's good? The effects fall into that category, but Michael Gross brings some decent scenes to the table. If you are jonesing for a dino flick, check it out if the bad CG, etc doesn't make you suicidal, but if you want something epic... Godzilla has a new film in a couple years.
2 and a half out of 5 one bite human snacks.
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