1. Roland Emmerich is the director.
2. Roland Emmerich is the writer.
3. Roland Emmerich is the producer.
4. No one in the industry has the balls to tell him to stop it. Instead he’s all “I have this great idea for a movie that I want to manage on every level because I’m Roland Emmerich” and Hollywood’s all “That’s gonna make $100 mil easy!”
5. Case in point: “The Day After Tomorrow,” which Roland wrote, produced and directed and was already bad enough but then he had to go ahead and CGI in those marvelous ravenous wolves who had escaped from a lifetime in captivity at the zoo but somehow did not die in the flood/freeze because apparently they were smart enough and not terrified enough in their new unfamiliar surroundings to get inside a building and hang until it was safe to come out. But apparently they were too stupid to feast on the countless corpses strewn throughout the city because they instead starved themselves into a frenzy with a preference for live prey, mainly Jake Gydsinthehall.
6. Yeah yeah I know, he also directed “Independence Day,” which was a rollicking good movie twelve years ago, but he blew all the capital accumulated from that blockbuster when he exec-produced craptastic stuff like “Godzilla” and “The Patriot.” And no it’s not unpatriotic to not like “The Patriot.”
7. Someone was smoking crack and a lot of it — probably Emmerich — to imagine that saber-toothed cats were ever ever ever t-h-i-s big:
8. I mean seriously, what a tool to have these cats standing somewhere around six feet tall at the shoulders with a head sized three times that of the average hominid of the day? Please! But typical that Emmerich couldn’t work with a life-sized smilodon and had to go and create his cgilodon, no doubt for the drama. I can just hear him having a fit yelling at the CGI team to “Make zee cats beegah!”
9. And no the humans aren’t pigmies. Nice try.
10. In fact: “Smilodon was the largest saber-toothed cat. It was a fierce predator about 4-5 feet (1.2-1.5 m) long and 3 feet (0.9 m) tall. It weighed about 440 lbs (200 kg). It was a bit smaller than a modern-day lion (Panthera leo), but much heavier. — Enchantedlearning.com
11. Let us now turn our deficient attentions on the skills of the ancient architects that exist in Emmerich’s funked up imagination. Strictly speaking they just did not build elaborate shit like this at the beginning of The Holocene:
12. Especially if the assumption (why start now?) can be made that the continental location of the film is ancient South America (the home of terror birds — surprise: somewhat realisitically rendered! — and the aforementioned saber-toothed cats). Or maybe it starts in South America but this tribe globetrots to the Gobi Desert via the land bridge that spanned the Bering Strait? That’s quite a hike!
13. Oh wait they have boats — sailboats!
Fancy-pants double-sailed aero-sleek America’s Cup winners, not the wimpy single-sailed variety whose first recorded use by the Egyptians didn’t take place until 6,000 years later.
14. Whether the good guys make a long journey or not there’s no way the above-pictured fort/fight scene takes place in Malta, which in fact, a Google search reveals is where the temple of Hagar Qim is — the oldest free-standing structure in the world at 3,600-years-old. It’s about 400 years older than the wonderous Egyptian pyramids.
15. It might be tempting to defend the film with a potential scenario that coulda happened to explain the absence of any ruins. Like maybe uh… maybe there was a large-but-not-too-large meteor that impacted directly upon the above-pictured Elks Lodgian-style fort in 9,800 BC or maybe 9,754 BC, totally destroying its existence and stuff. Yeah.
16. No. But spoken like a true Emmerichian. Congratulations.
15. Having beaten the historic inaccuracy of this movie to death you probably want me to just clam up and willingly suspend my disbelieve like all the other teenagers this type of pap caters too, but my disbelief is far too valuable to just hang it up so cheaply. I can do it for “The Lord of the Rings” or “Star Wars” or any of the Narnian Chronicles (the password is: fantasy), but if you base a movie in a real place on a real planet with creatures that existed in a certain way but then just go and make all sorts of shit up to suit your needs, well then excuse silly old me for expecting that reality to be delivered somewhat authentically.
16. And besides all that, it’s PG-13. I hate PG-13.
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