A Film Canon

No adventure film since The Thief Of Bagdad has been quite so exquisitely driven by cool shades as 10 000 BC, whose narrative - prehistoric tribesman D'Leh's (Steven Strait) journey to save beloved Evolet (Camilla Belles) - is little more than a pretext for Roland Emmerich to lovingly and breathlessly elaborate the blue hour. Virtually the entire film feels twilit, suffused with a sub-arctic, glaciated gloaming that follows D'Leh from the tundra, to the temperate regions, where it's given more of a blue-green inflection, to the arid regions, understood more as an expanse of sky than of land, as if to aestheticise the convergence of warm-climate and cold-climate deserts as an astronomically clear lens, free from the aberrations of liquid water. At its strongest, it's less like Emmerich is lighting an entire film with the twilit sky than shooting a film from the twilit sky, abstracting his epic landscapes into a hushed galactic beach, somewhere between Earth and Tattooine, and subsuming characters into constellations, narrative into nocturnal arc. As a result, it often feels like 10 000 AD as much as 10 000 BC, just as Emmerich's aim seems to be to revive silent cinema - Omar Sharif's narration is as extravagantly functional as the best intertitles - and its fascination with travelogues, topographies and bestiaries, but for an age in which images have absorbed all the language that could make a transition to sound cinema meaningful, an age in which all cinema is silent cinema. Even the computer generated images partake of the same breathlessness, segueing the pleasures of blue into the pleasures of bluescreen, grounding the film's aesthetic in the very materiality most CGI works so hard to hide - and it ultimately feels as if Emmerich's blue fascination transcends mere filtration, just as Technicolor transcended tinting and hand-coloring, gesturing instead towards a medium that's as fundamentally grounded in deep greens and blues as Technicolor was grounded in deep reds and oranges. From that perspective, it's the first great blu-ray film, best seen in the cavernous, atavistic space of a home entertainment unit, in a darkness more absolute, or at least manageable, than any attainable in a cinema.