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PRINTER-FRIENDLY VIEW 
Review of 10,000 BC (Harald Kloser/Thomas Wanker)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... if you appreciate raucous ear candy for what it is, with
bold orchestral melodies and brutal percussive and vocal rhythms pushing
all the right "guilty pleasure" buttons.
Avoid it... if you cannot tolerate hearing Hans Zimmer's King Arthur rearranged into an African adventure score, for 10,000 BC is among the more controversial subjects of plagiarism discussion to exist in the film score community.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
10,000 BC: (Harald Kloser/Thomas Wanker) Racist?
Perhaps. Stupid? Definitely. Little positive can be said about Roland
Emmerich's 2008 prehistoric mishap titled 10,000 BC. It basically
tells of a disgraced hunter of the Ural mountain region who has to
assemble the tribes of Africa to rescue a kidnapped woman of another
tribe in his homeland and defeat the nasty, enslaving forces of
"civilized" ancient Egypt. Unfortunately, he's a white dude, the girl is
white with blue eyes that are key to her mystical survival, and all of
the brutes who need organized are black men. As such, 10,000 BC
was the target of claims of racism at its debut, a problem only
compounded when critics absolutely blasted the film for a plethora of
other faults. Nobody expected Emmerich, this generation's master of
disaster, to direct, write, and produce a masterpiece, but the
mind-boggling quantity of poor special effects shots, historical
inaccuracies, insanely bad dialogue, and ridiculously slow pacing made
10,000 BC even worse than anyone could have anticipated. Its only
redeeming aspects are narration from Omar Sharif, who must have taken a
break from his head-butting exercises for this occasion, and the
improvement of the effects in time for a few encapsulating shots of a
pyramid being built and destroyed at the climax of the picture.
Audiences didn't seem to mind this brainless entertainment, eventually
turning the $100 million production into $300 million in theatre and
home video grosses. Among the more generically pleasing elements of the
picture for the mainstream was its soundtrack, a collaborative effort
between Harald Kloser, Thomas Wanker, and Thomas Schobel. Kloser and
Wanker had become Emmerich's replacement for David Arnold in The Day
After Tomorrow and would go on to reprise the partnership for
2012. In the case of Kloser, 10,000 BC also represented a
screenwriting debut, a humiliating effort (which would have been better
if the superior whites in the story didn't speak English!) that didn't
deter Emmerich from allowing the composer to co-write 2012 as
well. Kloser's composing partner was in the process of moving to England
and changing his name from Wanker to Wander, neither of which
particularly appealing in English. And Schobel, a Kloser associate,
impressed the production with a variety of primal percussive sounds that
afforded him some co-compositional credit in the end. The vocal talents
of Joel Virgel early in the production process of the score earned him
the role of a tribal leader in the film.
Hans Zimmer wasn't a member of the team for 10,000 BC, but he may as well have gotten some credit at the end of the day as well. More on that issue will come later in this review. For a casual listener not concerned with the history of film scores, 10,000 BC is easily the best musical achievement in the early Emmerich/Kloser collaborations. Unlike The Day After Tomorrow and 2012, the richly textured 10,000 BC is engagingly melodic and contains the kind of unique orchestrations absent from the other scores. The first music conceived for the picture represents the primordial, source-like chants of the African tribes, courtesy Schobel's percussion and Virgel's vocals. These sequences (as heard on album in "Opening," "Celebration," and "Food") meet the expectations of regional stereotypes without being particularly tacky, but they still translate into the album's most challenging moments. The second major part of the score for 10,000 BC is its unrestrained orchestral lyricism. The broadly majestic symphonic sway of the score's two major themes yields several moments of notice in the film. The primary theme for the protagonist is an optimistic representation of fluid movement that's as easy to digest as anything you'll hear in popcorn-ready film music. Heard first in "Speech," this theme simmers late in "I Was Not Brave" (highlighted by gorgeous ethnic woodwind), shows signs of redemptive life for the full ensemble in "Lead Them," and unleashes a monumental performance with bold counterpoint in "Sea of Sand." The idea is expressed at great length in "The End" and "10,000 BC/End Credits," likely the two most impressive tracks for casual listeners of the album. The theme actually has three distinct phrases, interchanged and overlapped at will. The main phrase is the most frequently stated portion of the theme, utilized in every circumstance and ending each section of its progression with three distinctly descending notes. A phantom "A" phrase that sometimes precedes this theme is unfortunately underplayed in 10,000 BC, a John Debney-like fantasy progression heard at 1:25 into "Sea of Sand" and at 0:45 into "10,000 BC/End Credits." The main phrase that follows often utilizes an underlying rhythmic device on strings that sometimes branches out on its own. Debuting at about 0:40 into "Speech" and lending gravity at 1:00 into "The End," the idea is accelerated at 1:30 into "10,000 BC/End Credits" and becomes its own separate phrase within the theme. Its ability to generate momentum within a cue makes it an invaluable partner to the main theme. Aside from all of the various facets of the primary thematic identity, the female lead receives her own pretty little theme in "Evolet" (enticing woodwinds here function well) and "You Came For Me," the latter cue morphing the idea into the protagonist's theme. Finally, the third aspect of the score is the brutal tone for the civilized Egyptians, which very successfully merges the two previously mentioned elements of instrumentation into some ballsy enslavement music. Utilizing percussion slammed with ferocity, this idea is overlayed with mournful chants and angry, yelled vocals, often screaming in surprisingly palatable harmony with the joining orchestral ensemble. An actual theme for this portion exists at 0:40 into "Mountain of the Gods" and the icing on the cake is the use of massive ancient horn sounds to represent the mammoths (or mannaks, as they're called here) carrying the heavy loads. The distant horn effect is a blend of an animal's death cry and the whistle you hear on large, industrial assembly lines, easily the single most impressive aspect of Kloser, Wanker, and Schobel's efforts for 10,000 BC. It literally gives you the feeling that an immense undertaking of prehistoric proportions is in process, and its mix is also very expertly applied in harmony with the ensemble. A highlight of the score comes in the middle of "Speech," when a bold performance of the main theme with impressive brass counterpoint is overtaken by the evil civilization theme, complete with several of these blowing horn effects (overlapping once to great effect) and more angry vocalizations over raw percussion and low brass. This theme disintegrates appropriately in "Free the Mannaks," with one last wail of the horn in a panic at about 1:00 into that cue. While few, the statements of the enslavement material steal the show in 10,000 BC, if only because they're among the score's most original aspects. The best of the other thematic ideas in the score are summarized in "10,000 BC/End Credits," which opens with the only truly upbeat integration of the orchestra and regional vocals. The remainder of the work contains a few notable action cues but is otherwise somewhat anonymous. Praised for its striking tone must be the chaotic ensemble performances of "Terror Birds," though most listeners will find "Mark of the Hunter" and "Not a God" to be more accessible in their percussive rhythms (despite being derivative). On the whole, 10,000 BC is an easy score to program into a consistently satisfying twenty minute listening experience, with a coherent narrative flow that exceeds the quality of that of any of these composers' other major works. If this review was to conclude here, 10,000 BC would easily be a four star score. It overachieves in general and greatly enhances several individual scenes. A slight brass error at 2:05 into "10,000 BC/End Credits" is the only performance quibble. When you step back, the music fits the personality of the film perfectly and is understandably a crowd-pleaser. Unfortunately, some of the ideas from the score already fit quite comfortably into Hans Zimmer's King Arthur. It's highly likely that the stylish 2004 Zimmer score was used as a temp track in 10,000 BC, but it is remarkable just how lazy Kloser and his associates were when adapting these filmmaker wishes into their own product. The memorably rowdy villain material, along with Evolet's theme and the seldom employed "A" phrase of the primary theme may be instrumentally generic and thus seem derivative, but at least they are technically original. There have been some claims that Evolet's theme also distinctly references ideas in King Arthur, but these are difficult to clearly identify. The same can't be said for the primary melody and the rhythmic phrase underneath it. Had only one of these two been so similar to King Arthur, perhaps a pass could have been granted. But the fact that both ideas take so thoroughly from the previous score brings the word "plagiarism" into the equation. The main theme here is clearly derived from that heard in the breathy vocals of "Hold the Ice" and "All of Them!" in King Arthur, the main melody also represented in that score's song adaptation at the start of its album, "Tell Me Now." Zimmer expresses the idea twice in his trademark synthetically-aided sound of immense depth in "All of Them!" The underlying rhythm in 10,000 BC's main theme stems from a less often utilized idea in King Arthur that nonetheless is very obviously heard in the middle portions of "All of Them!" A detailed examination will show that there are indeed structural differences between both ideas in the two themes, usually in the form of phrases rearranged in various orders (Zimmer doesn't really present them in a consistent order each time, in part because he references the theme less frequently in King Arthur than Kloser and Wanker do in 10,000 BC, another irony in this puzzle), but even these alterations can't mask the several identical phrases contained within. So the question is this: Does the use of this arguably less organized Zimmer material from King Arthur in 10,000 BC merit equal shame when compared to Tyler Bates' famous plagiarism of Elliot Goldenthal's Titus in 300? Some will say yes, though the studios involved have never made the same fuss about 10,000 BC. Indeed, film score collectors and Zimmer enthusiasts in particular often dismiss 10,000 BC completely (and sometimes with disdain and contempt) because of this probable temp track similarity. But it's difficult to declare outright plagiarism in this case because what Kloser and Wanker did with the theme causes it to sound so different in terms of orchestration that its entire demeanor has been changed. Zimmer's use of the ideas is relegated to the cliche of new age-like female vocals and his usual bass-heavy pounding of deliberately overwhelming, masculine power. Kloser and Wanker's version of those ideas are vastly better developed orchestrally, using vibrant instrumentation and counterpoint in ways that make Zimmer's theme come alive with organic, emotional appeal. Not a single one of the trademarks of Zimmer's writing carry over into the later score. They also take far more time to develop the themes in a wide range of situational variants in 10,000 BC than Zimmer did in King Arthur, further enhancing its comparative personality. For some, as mentioned before, identical progressions are too much to overcome (and they will prove distracting when watching the film), but when you carefully compare the personality and orchestration of the two, they are sufficiently disparate to avoid the harshest of plagiarism declarations. It is ironic, especially given the strength of King Arthur, that better enunciated versions of the same theme in 10,000 BC by the usually taciturn-styled Kloser and Wanker are preferable, but that will certainly be the case for some. Whether you declare plagiarism or simply write off this issue because this film was so wretched, it's hard not to label 10,000 BC as a guilty pleasure of the highest order. As such, what the heart deems as four-star material is what the brain protests as being worthy of two (if even that), and a disgruntled three stars seems like the only logical compromise. ***
TRACK LISTINGS:
Total Time: 49:04
NOTES & QUOTES:
The insert includes a note from Kloser about his involvement with the film and
the contributions of others to the score.
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