10,000 BC

Those familiar with director Roland Emmerich will have come to expect a certain kind of movie. Aside from the change of pace that was Colonial Revolution yarn, The Patriot, Emmerich is known for big, effects-laden blockbusters like Independence Day, Godzilla and The Day After Tomorrow. Though his movies aren’t usually acclaimed for their critical reaction or creativity, the German filmmaker’s features typically attract attention and sufficiently rattle the box-offices (Independence Day was the first film to gross $100 million in less than a week and went on to become hugely successful).

Though 10,000 B.C. seemed like it would be another picture in the same mould, it’s surprisingly bad.

Here a girl held as a prophecy by her clan of mammoth hunters, Evolet (Camilla Belle) wants to run away with secret love D’Leh (Steven Strait), he refuses as he has felt like an outcast ever since his father unexpectedly left when he was a child. After a successful mammoth hunt, though, a foreign group of vicious hunters raid the camp taking Evolet and virtually all the best hunters as prisoners. With the help of surrogate father-figure Tic Tic (Cliff Curtis), D’Leh embarks on a journey to rescue his beloved, save his people and become the leader that his people need.

While a voyage involving cavemen, sabertooth tigers and wooly mammoths sounds like the recipe for an intriguing motion picture, this is a dull tale that never lives up to its fairly interesting premise. We might not expect James Cameron-style storytelling, but with a mission with little excitement, a by-the-numbers romance and tired epic angle 10,000 BC seems to be aimed at teenage boys and those who like to have their noggin switched firmly onto autopilot during a trip to the flicks.

All of this could have possibly been forgiven – or at least monetarily ignored – had there been plenty of enjoyable fun or tension. Sadly, 10,000 BC constantly falls flat, occasionally seems disturbingly lazy and never generates even the smallest surge of intensity. In an attempt to gain a PG-13 rating, Emmerich avoids most of the violence you would expect from a movie featuring hunters and fierce creatures, which results in a bland movie that is less dangerous than a plate of nachos with jalapenos.

In terms of CGI, Emmerich’s latest also falls short. While I have no doubt there was plenty of slogging over computers to create the shed-load of digital effects on show, the end result is nothing short of ‘meh’, with beasts that are obviously not real. Fifteen years after Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park pioneered big creature effects, 10,000 BC seems way behind the curve.

Watching 10,000 BC, I felt a strange pang of sympathy for the two leads, Strait and Belle. From what I have read, they worked their cave-dress wearing bums off and will, no doubt, be delighted to be involved in a feature movie of such spectacle. Unhappily, they don’t set the screen alight and don’t become instantly memorable. Good thing for them is that Emmerich’s reputation will survive this movie and he might be able to use them in his next larger than life, digitally-rendered ‘epic’.

Unlike so many bad movies out there, 10,000 BC doesn’t provoke an angry reaction. Though in time it might become one of those ‘so bad it’s good’ films, the experience of watching it is a big let down as it feels like it should have been made ten years ago. In more ways that one 10,000 BC.is sadly prehistoric.