Movie Review: The Lost Future (2010)

I was working on a Dungeons & Dragons campaign that involved an entire orc nation with human slaves, and looking for visual ideas to work from.  I read the manga JAPAN drawn by Berzerk's Kentaro Miura for some ideas.  I had watched the old 70's movie At The Earth's Core with Doug McClure, Peter Cushing and Caroline Munro for even more ideas.  Upon a trip to Blockbuster Video (yes, they still have those), I picked up a copy to watch, since they didn't have a copy of the sequel to Uwe Boll's In The Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale.  When I reached a certain point, I realized I had seen bits of this movie before on SyFy Channel, and hadn't watched the whole thing.  Now I had paid or it, and I would watch this joint South African-German production and review it.

Our story concerns a caveman tribe called Grey Rock, containing the very manly Savan (Corey Sevier) and the not-so-manly Kaleb (Sam Claflin).  Both live in a wild untamed wilderness with their tribesmen, hunting giant mega-sloths of the Ice Age and bring back the spoils to their mates: Savan to his yellow-haired mate Dorel (Annabelle Wallis) and Kaleb...not so much.  Kaleb pines for Dorel, and his sister Miru (Eleanor Tomlinson) makes a point to make fun of him for it.  While they live in relative safety, they are still in danger from the Mutants: a subhuman race that roams the forests and mountains.  They are savage and if they bite you, you're infected and you'll turn into one of them.
The lives of these cavemen is turned upside down by an invasion of Mutants.  Most of the tribe locks themselves away in a cave, but Kaleb, Savan and Dorel are left outside to make their way to go for help.  They are almost killed by a Mutant when they are saved by a mysterious stranger named Amal (British actor Sean Bean).  He is a member of an elite group of protectors of various other tribes and bears strange artifacts with him.  He says that no matter if they were bitten or not, if a Mutant breathed on you then infection would set in.  With that, Amal leads these cavemen into the real world -- the world AFTER the fall or mankind -- to find a cure for the disease.

Playing with the idea of cavemen in the future is not a new idea.  It has been explored in films like America 3000, Battlefield Earth, the remake of The Time Machine, and even Planet of the Apes (both original and the remake).  The thing that makes it such a fertile playground is how exciting it is to get the reveal.  When people see that the world is changed so much, save the visual landmarks that have stood the weathering of time for familiarity's sake, it can awe a person or shake them to the core.  It's one of those moments that make a passable movie great.  The same could not be said of this movie.
When the reveal comes, it's in the friggin' title: THE LOST FUTURE -- as in "the future in the past."  If you missed that on the cover of the DVD, it comes up again as the title card.  Understandably the movie was set in the future, but if they had tried to let us know that in the movie without a whole lot of exposition at the 2/3 mark, the movie would have done a lot better. 
CHOICE CUTS:

• The traitor Gagen (Jonathan Piennar) and his daughter, Giselle (Hannah Tointon).  The father, formerly a part of Amal's elite group, ruthlessly betrayed them and founded a city as its dictator.  He found time to have his daughter Giselle and she ended up being his polar opposite, an angel of mercy.  To follow more of these two would have been great.
• Mutants.  More like ORCS.
• Giselle is wearing a white dress made of crushed water bottles, the better to mark her as a water-bearing angel of mercy.

This movie had its moments, but there's a reason why this is a SyFy Original Picture.  This movie gets a rating of 7.