Joel Fry-days: 10,000 BC (2008, PG-13)

Look, this movie has 10% on Rotten Tomatoes—I knew what I was getting into. Every actor has stuff like this in their filmography, and because I’m me, I can’t just not watch it if I can get my hands on it. I had to see it for myself, and now I have.

When a band of “four-legged demons” (a.k.a. slavers on horseback) attacks the hunter-gatherer Yagahl tribe, one of the captives includes the beautiful Evolet. D’Leh, who’s in love with her, vows to rescue her. His mission takes him across the known world—he encounters frightening beasts and rallies other tribes in his quest to rescue Evolet and the rest of his people.

We’ll get this out of the way first: history accuracy, I don’t know her. Yes, this is a prehistoric action movie, but these characters have all kinds of things that humans didn’t develop until much later. I have no idea how the geography works. And while some of the other tribes D’Leh meets are specifically Black and meant to be from what is now Africa, the members of the Yagahl tribe are cast with an assorted range of Black and brown actors…but Steven Strait, who plays D’Leh, is white. Of course he is. Oh, and part of the reason Evolet’s beauty is so striking is because she has blue eyes.

For the most part, the story is just dull. Generic prophecy, generic action, generic love story. There’s just not much to it, and the most interesting action set pieces come at the beginning, with a dramatic mammoth hunt, and the end, with the climactic showdown against the slavers. In the middle, the film drags, and I don’t have any interest in D’Leh’s big savior narrative.

The moments I like are mostly small—the moments where we remember that prehistoric people were still still people. Two captured boys from different tribes navigating the language barrier. A pair of Yagahl crying out when one of their friends is killed. D’Leh struggling to keep his composure when another tribe invites him in and their hospitality involves spicier food than he’s ever eaten before. Little human moments in the midst of the larger disengaging plot.

10,000 BC was Joel Fry’s feature film debut. Kinda wild to have your first movie being a big action film with CGI beasts, although he wouldn’t have gotten in on too much of that stuff. Fry plays Lu’kibu, one of the Yagahl. He has a moderate amount of screentime but very little to actually do. Lu’kibu is among the group of captives, and mostly he’s there to help fill out the large group scenes. He has maybe six or seven lines, sprinkled throughout the movie.

So yeah, not much there. To the extent that Lu’kibu has any characterization, its, Are we sure that this D’Leh guy is really all that? Any time someone is expressing doubt in D’Leh’s abilities or leadership, there’s a decent chance that it’s Lu’kibu. That’s what most of his limited lines are about, and it comes through in Joel Fry’s facial acting as well. Lu’kibu’s side eye is another one of those “prehistoric people were still people” moments for me, and I admittedly find it kind of amusing.

Accent Watch

I don’t know. All the Yagahl use some kind of accent, but I have no idea what it’s supposed to be.

Recommend?

In General – No. A Big Dumb Action Movie can be fun under the right circumstances, but this one just isn’t very interesting.

Joel Fry – Naw. As a Joel Fry movie, this is more a series of glimpses than anything else. There’s just not much for him to do.

Warnings

Violence, scary moments for kids, drinking, and thematic elements.

Doctor Who: “The Waters of Mars” (2009)

*Episode premise spoilers*

This has always been my favorite of the 2009 Tenth Doctor specials, even though it really freaks me out (any type of “the infected” narrative invariably gets to me.) Gripping story, I’m invested in the oneshot characters, and it’s a fascinating scenario to put the Doctor in.

As the Tenth Doctor runs from his own destiny, he encounters a human colony on Mars. But not just any colony, the first—it’s 2059, and this is Bowie Base One. Their future is history for the Doctor, and although the details are a mystery, he knows that their mission is doomed to end in death and destruction. Knowing that this is a fixed point and he can’t interfere, the Doctor tries to best to just get out, but the end has already begun.

We’ve seen the Doctor run into fixed points in time before. It’s always agonizing for them to let people suffer as history takes its course. But “The Waters of Mars” does something interesting, because this isn’t history from the audience’s perspective. This is our future, and yet the Doctor knows the inevitable course it has to take, just like he knows the course of Pompeii or the French Revolution. I really like the scene where he discovers where/when he is and he realizes who everyone on the base is, calling each of them by name and citing their role in the mission.

In this way, it’s also a celebrity historical about the future, since the Doctor is thoroughly taken with the captain, Adelaide Brooke. It’s easy for him to slip into his fanboy tendencies with her, even though she’s severe and by-the-book and has no time for nonsense from him. And the Doctor comes by his adoration honestly—she proves herself shrewd and observant, recognizing how much more the Doctor knows than he tries to let on.

In addition to Lindsay Duncan, who brings a steely intelligence to Adelaide, the crew of Bowie Base One offers up a few familiar faces of the “before I knew them” variety. There’s Gemma Chan, who went on to play Astrid in Crazy Rich Asians, as Mia, and Joplin Sibtain (a.k.a. my beloved Brasso from Andor) plays Tarak. Both are relatively small roles, and we now know they can both do much more than that, but it’s still fun to see them!

The story is very well done. There’s a strong emotional core here, and even though it’s not my absolute favorite base-under-siege story, it still does a good job of making me feel for the characters. The Flood are super creepy baddies—they look really unsettling, and as I said, any type of infection angle always gets to me. And the connection between water and zombies is apt:

ADELAIDE: “We're safe. It's hermetically sealed. They can't get in.”

DOCTOR: “Water is patient, Adelaide. Water just waits. It wears down the clifftops, the mountains, the whole of the world. Water always wins.”

It’s quite the episode for the Doctor. There are points where, for me, it gets a little too deep into the Ten angst, but I do understand where it’s coming from on that score. The Doctor has been traveling alone ever since what happened with Donna at the end of series 4, he’s been avoiding portents for the end of this life, and although he’s just run into one of his heroes, the laws of time demand that he stand by and watch her meet her doom. He’s going through a lot. One of David Tennant’s talents in his performance as Ten is how quickly he can shift from silly to scary, and he makes good use of that here.

Other Doctor Lives: The Street: Season 2, Episode 4 – “Taxi” (2007)

*Episode premise spoilers.*

Looks like I was right that characters who are featured in an episode of The Street get seeded into the preceding episode. Matt Smith/Ian Hanley is a major player here, although I wouldn’t necessarily call him the clear lead of the story. And it turns out that quite a few of the characters in this episode appeared briefly in “Demolition”—I just didn’t realize it because Smith was the only actor I was looking out for. I’m guessing they were probably there with Smith in the background of a pub scene. Anyway, here’s the episode.

The Hanleys are doing their best to keep everything going while their dad awaits trial on drug charges. But oldest son Ian gets into trouble when he and his cousin Gary have a night out—Gary winds up battering a taxi driver in a drunken rage, but Ian is the one left holding the bag. With Ian in custody, his mom tries to believe in his innocence while Gary’s mom tries to make sure her son doesn’t have to pay for what he did.

It's an interesting story. Like “Demolition,” it’s fairly heavy-handed, but in a different way. I like seeing how this one horrible decision and one lie cause so much havoc for two families. Gary is supposed to be joining the military in a couple weeks—if the truth gets out, his future is over, but Ian is terrified that if Gary leaves for training, he’ll be left to go down for a crime he didn’t commit. Gary’s mom will do whatever she can to protect his secret, and Ian is merely a function of that. If getting him off assures that Gary won’t have to come clean, she’ll do what she can to get him the best lawyer, but if he endangers Gary’s freedom, she has no use for him. Ian’s mom was already struggling with her husband in jail, so Ian’s troubles nearly break her. She wants to believe he’s not capable of hurting someone so badly, but as the police investigate, she isn’t sure what to believe anymore.

A couple familiar faces in the cast today. I couldn’t recall where I’d seen Lorraine Ashbourne, who plays Ian’s mom, but IMDb tells me she played Mrs. Fairfax in the Ruth Wilson/Toby Stephens Jane Eyre. And Gina McKee, who plays Gary’s mom, was in In the Loop with Peter Capaldi (wonder if she’s acted opposite any other Doctors?)

Even though the story revolves around Ian, he’s more of its object than its subject. The episode is at least as much about his mom, Gary, and Gary’s mom as it is about him. So there’s not as much screentime for Smith as I would’ve expected, but he does a nice job with it. Ian is a pretty basic lad who’s been thrown into an enormously difficult situation. Throughout much of the story, you get a sense that he doesn’t quite know how to respond because he can’t fully believe this is happening to him. He can’t believe that one night out could’ve gone so wrong, he can’t believe he got nicked for something he didn’t do, and he can’t believe that, for all of Gary’s promises to stand by him, his cousin might actually leave him twisting in the wind.

As such, Smith’s performance is frequently bewildered, agitated, and defensive. Ian is reaching for anything that might even look like a lifeline. He knows his story (which he’s amended to leave out Gary) sounds flimsy, but it’s all he has so he’s clinging to it as tightly as he can.

Accent Watch

Northern.

Recommend?

In General – As I said before, a soft maybe. It’s interesting but doesn’t pull me in all the way.

Matt Smith – Maybe. Even if Ian is less of a protagonist in this episode than I expected, Smith turns in a solid performance. Not to mention, he was so young when he started on Who that his pre-Doctor performances are always intriguing to me.

Warnings

Violence, language, drinking/smoking/drug references, and thematic elements.