10,000 BC
Makes Stargate seem a documentary. The hodgepodge of references to ancient stuff is crazy. Of course the alpha couple are Canadian dudes with dreadlocks, for budgetary reasons, rather than outright racism.
Our main tribe of Neanderthal live in the Kilimanjaro(?), just chilling, hunting mammoths(!). The main dude is bullied since his father left when he was little. On his first big hunt, his hand is stuck on a net so he accidentally kills a mammoth, the tribe hails him as the next leader, and he gets the girl of his dreams.
His mentor finds this cheating, so our hero mopes around a bit and gives back the white spear, which causes grief for the girl. I guess she wants to be the queen.
Doesn’t really matter, since four-legged daemons (AKA horses with people on them) raid their village and take almost everyone as slaves. The remaining adults give chase, even though they consider climbing down from a mountain an insurmountable obstacle.
They walk all the way into tropical jungle and reach the horseman, but they are all attacked by terror birds (from Australia), so more dudes are captured. The remaining guys walk some more to a large savanna, where our protagonist rescues a Smilodon, Androcles and the Lion-style. The tiger remember him later and doesn’t eat him, leading to prophet status for him among some Zulus(!).
Turns out his father did not left for tobacco and never came back, he was picking up good seeds for them to become sedentary by cultivating crops. The alpha couple are the prophesied salvator mundi.
After rounding up all Xhosa-speaking tribes in the area, and since the daemons have boats to go downstream a desert river(!), the good army takes a shortcut and walks over the Rub’ al-Khali, following Polaris, and end up in Egypt(!!).
It’s not your ancestor’s Egypt: the pharaoh is a foreign dude (so Ptolomaic dynasty), with Indian lieutenants, and they are building the pyramids with slaves from all the tribes we met, and harnessing mammoths. Woolly mammoths, in the desert.
Anyway, our Arabian Larry, or Moses, rebels the slaves, they rout the mammoths, kill the kapos, and march on the pharaoh. He gives him the possibility of leaving with the girl and his people. Our hero pretends to betray the slaves to get closer, and throws the white spear to kill the Pharaoh, and the mob goes wild, vanquishing the leaders and burning the boats.
The raiders on horseback that kidnap the girl have a subplot amongst them of betrayal and attempted rape, you start to think the main dude is a tragic villain, but he just turns bad at the end and gets offed and forgotten.
The main dudes do not leverage their political power to lord over the pyramids, they just get back home, this was only a raid for them. The Zulus give them corn(!!!), and they plant it in the snow, which turns green in the next year.
This is a bloated Roland Emmerich film, with alleged environmental concerns, hidden behind the thick fur of big budget action set pieces. Since all the characters are uneducated louts, there aren’t even soliloquies about the people destroying mother earth, only unnecessary voice over with stupid accents.
Keep an eye for many many character actors in supporting roles, and bask in the glory of random Canadians as leads, knowing that Steven Strait did went to space in The Expanse.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.