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Ao, The Last Neanderthal (DVD)
Year: 2010
Rating: MA
Director: Jacques Malaterre
Cast: Helmi Dridi , Agie, Ilian Ivanov
Release Date: October 20, 2011
Distributor: Hopscotch
The Film: 2.0
FILMINK rates DVDs and Blu-rays out of 5"Pretentious and overly familiar."
This is bookended by portentous disclaimers regarding the disappearance of the humanoid species of Neanderthal, with the hanging suggestion that homo sapiens - that's us folks - could just as easily disappear. The extinction scenario presented here from the point of view of Ao (Simon Paul Sutton) focuses on disease and genocide from the more fleet-of-foot and less nasally-enlarged sapiens as being the primary causes for the Neanderthal vanishing from Earth. Ao is a surprisingly enlightened sort, or at least his narration, which plays over the guttural ‘neanderthalese' he speaks, seems to suggest. He communes with nature and mimics the sounds of the animals he encounters, whereas human ancestors are shown to be brutal and nasty, slaughtering Ao's clan in the early section of this film. This inspires his journey from prehistoric Siberia to the Mediterranean to attempt to find his last surviving relatives.
This is a confused and overlong mixture of Jean-Jacques Annaud's Quest For Fire and Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, borrowing liberally from both. While the scenery is spectacular, Simon Paul Sutton is no Ron Perlman, despite the amount of forehead make-up employed. His character's new age nature seems laughably like ‘80s schlockfest Beastmaster. Pretentious and overly familiar.
