10,000 BC

"I claim the white spear. And with it, my woman."

Roland Emmerich has a remarkable talent for draining all the life out of interesting stories. In The Day After Tomorrow, he devastated the Earth with a global warming catastrophe, and then had his characters spend a good fifteen minutes fighting off a pack of wolves. In Independence Day, he defeated the aliens by having our heroes break into their spaceship and… hack into their computer. Now, in 10,000 BC, he takes us back to prehistoric times to witness a really, really long chase scene.

That’s not to say that the film is short on spectacle. Occasionally Emmerich will interrupt the chase scene to distract us with, for example, a very impressive herd of CGI mammoths, or a sabre-toothed tiger. And if you’re paying very close attention, you may even get to see a big-ass ostrich. Those of you who haven’t seen any extravagantly budgeted Hollywood movies made in the past five years can go nuts. The rest would be justified in expecting something more in exchange for your time and money.

All you’ll get, sadly, is Apocalypto for idiots. Omar Sharif narrates (or, more accurately, moans) a tale of a primitive tribal civilization — so primitive that, though they otherwise speak flawless English, they apparently refer to snow as “white rain,” which makes sense as long as you don’t think about it for more than two seconds at a time. (They also, for no good reason, speak English with bizarre, indeterminate accents — star Steven Strait mostly just trills his r’s, while some of the others sound vaguely British.) There’s a lot about prophesies and chosen ones, though at least half of it falls by the wayside and absolutely all of it is pointless filler. It is also weirdly nonchalant, as if the prevalence of legitimately supernatural mysticism in 10,000 BC is a historical fact, or at least assumed by all. I guess the target audience — the folks who applauded at the end of my screening, say — might have assumed.

D’Leh (Strait) is the young warrior destined to lead his people to something something. (The characters have a tendency to mumble when it comes to prophecy specifics.) When his beloved (Camilla Belle) is kidnapped by “four-legged demons” (namely people on horses; had these been centaurs, we might have had something) he and his mentor Tic’Tic (Cliff Curtis) along with their sidekick Baku (Nathaniel Baring) give chase. Along the way they recruit other tribes (some of which feed them food that is exotic and gross, which is the film’s idea of a joke), all the better to eventually free the girl from the god-like ruler known only as “the Almighty” who reigns over the four-legged demon kidnappers.

As I’ve tried to establish, 10,000 BC‘s world-building is either laughable or, if you’re feeling more charitable, non-existent. The same goes for virtually everything else. The only discernible characteristics to D’Leh are nobility and conflicted feelings about his father; there is absolutely nothing to be said about Camilla Belle’s “Evolet.” Aside from the fancy special effects, the action scenes are rudimentary, confusing or both; Emmerich occasionally resorts to people being hit in the crotch to break up the monotony. There is, of course, an inspirational battlefield address, but its words are completely empty.

This is about as boring a prehistoric epic as you can imagine. Even the scenery is bland; Emmerich chooses a lot of too-dark shots of puny-looking mountains and tries to make up for it by spinning the camera. On the bright side, an inordinate number of characters (and extras) are speared, which looks like tremendous fun. I can think of a few people I’d like to try it on.

-- Eugene Novikov

Released:	2008
Starring:	Nathaniel Baring, Camilla Belle, Steven Strait, Omar Sharif, Cliff Curtis
Directed by:	Roland Emmerich
Rated:	PG-13