I'm guessing some movie producer (or whomever) was looking at his dog and wondering how all this love came to be. Now that, he thought, would make a great movie! Just how did a Homo Sapien become the Alpha leader to a vicious wolf?
Apparently, you do this by having a mini-group of Paleolithic tribesmen leave their mini-village to travel for weeks (if not months) in search of food, across a totally barren landscape (somehow always finding plenty of firewood), cleverly killing dozens of buffalo, presumably drag back enough unpreserved meat to last the winter, inadvertently leaving one boy to bounce off a 100 foot sheer cliff, set his own leg, fight off a pack of wolves, befriend a fierce adult female wolf, survive after falling into a frozen lake during a blizzard, kill a 300lb prehistoric mountain lion with a homemade arrow, and so on and so on.
In some respects this was a nicely done film. It had good expression, a stylized suggestion of what Europe might have looked like 20,000 years ago (ridiculously barren but visually impressive), a story of sorts, and a presentation of tribal life that could be understood by children. Maybe it was too much.
It should have been presented more as a fantasy, like The Jungle Book. It vigorously attempted to be realistic, especially with the subtitles for a patently humorous Upper Paleolithic language (how does ugah-moogha olo yagee boomba somehow translate into the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain). It and other attempts at realism defied its constant assault on reason. Either make up a whimsical story about a boy and his dog or take the time to research Nature. You can't have it both ways.
Archeologists have shown domesticated dogs likely existed 15,000 years before the timeline of this movie. By 20,000 B.C. Golden Doodles were probably all the rage. Such assumptions are no less ridiculous than this dog origin story.
Hopefully, the impact of a film like this will be not unlike that of Conan the Barbarian; primitive entertainment with no connection to human evolution. Sadly, too many will view this film as a reasonably accurate portrayal of prehistoric ages.
4 Stinks 1 Wink
Apparently, you do this by having a mini-group of Paleolithic tribesmen leave their mini-village to travel for weeks (if not months) in search of food, across a totally barren landscape (somehow always finding plenty of firewood), cleverly killing dozens of buffalo, presumably drag back enough unpreserved meat to last the winter, inadvertently leaving one boy to bounce off a 100 foot sheer cliff, set his own leg, fight off a pack of wolves, befriend a fierce adult female wolf, survive after falling into a frozen lake during a blizzard, kill a 300lb prehistoric mountain lion with a homemade arrow, and so on and so on.
In some respects this was a nicely done film. It had good expression, a stylized suggestion of what Europe might have looked like 20,000 years ago (ridiculously barren but visually impressive), a story of sorts, and a presentation of tribal life that could be understood by children. Maybe it was too much.
It should have been presented more as a fantasy, like The Jungle Book. It vigorously attempted to be realistic, especially with the subtitles for a patently humorous Upper Paleolithic language (how does ugah-moogha olo yagee boomba somehow translate into the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain). It and other attempts at realism defied its constant assault on reason. Either make up a whimsical story about a boy and his dog or take the time to research Nature. You can't have it both ways.
Archeologists have shown domesticated dogs likely existed 15,000 years before the timeline of this movie. By 20,000 B.C. Golden Doodles were probably all the rage. Such assumptions are no less ridiculous than this dog origin story.
Hopefully, the impact of a film like this will be not unlike that of Conan the Barbarian; primitive entertainment with no connection to human evolution. Sadly, too many will view this film as a reasonably accurate portrayal of prehistoric ages.
4 Stinks 1 Wink
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