Eventually Hollywood will learn it doesn’t make sense to spend millions of dollars on a B-movie. It may just take awhile. But if the road towards re-education didn’t begin with Grindhouse, it will possibly start with Roland Emmerich’s 10,000 B.C., the trailer to which is now available courtesy of CHUD.com. The $75,000,000 movie follows a tradition of cheesy Saturday afternoon flicks like 1940’s One Million B.C. and its 1966 remake One Million Years B.C. Of course, back then the B.C. stood for “before computer (effects)” and featured the spectacular — and silly, maybe — visual effects of Roy Seawright and Ray Harryhausen, respectively.
Sure, in terms of effects and spectacle, 10,000 B.C. looks cool, just as Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow looked cool, but it also has the potential of being unintentionally funny, in the same way the primitive people in Battlefield Earth came off as ridiculous. Emmerich may as well have put in dinosaurs, despite the historical inaccuracy, because this isn’t the kind of movie to be taken seriously, anyway. The one thing the movie may have going for it is it’s combination of historical epics like Alexander with fantasy epics like The Lord of the Rings, which gave us its own mammoth-like creatures. I just imagine the story being nowhere near as believable as either one of those examples.
Anyway, if attempts to make big-budget B-movies didn’t work for Tim Burton (Mars Attacks!), Peter Jackson (King Kong) or Tarantino and Rodriguez (Grindhouse), could it really work for the guy who already failed such an attempt with Godzilla?
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