10,000 BC (**1/2)

Wouldn’t it be interesting to know what life was like 12,000 years ago? Suffice it to say that director Roland Emmerich (The Day After Tomorrow, Independence Day) likely didn’t burden himself with mounds of research in trying to depict his vision of things. (Unusually, Emmerich’s screenwriting partner, Harald Kloser, is the film score’s composer, making his first foray into words along with music.) The result is a hodgepodge of ideas that might have been gathered from surveying a group of high schoolers. Weren’t there mammoths back then? Yes, there were, and so Emmerich’s story envisions a legend, narrated by Omar Sharif, of Asiatic hunter-gatherers who may be doomed by their reliance on hunting beasts with legs the size of men. The hunting sequence in the first half hour of the movie is probably the most stirring. Later on, we also see some creatures that look like a kind of small dinosaur/bird hybrid.

The main story, though, concerns the efforts of one of the hunters (Steven Strait) to free others of his tribe who’ve been kidnapped by “four-legged demons” to the south. Principally, he aims to prove his loyalty to the beautiful Evolet (Camilla Belle), whose maidenhood is threatened at every turn. He braves every hardship to achieve this goal, not unlike the way Dennis Quaid did to rescue his son in The Day After Tomorrow. Besides that, his trek affords the filmmakers to show all manner of terrain, from ice and snow in the beginning to forest, and to desert, and then to gather up a multicultural lot to fight a final battle, not unlike the militia Mel Gibson gathers up in Emmerich’s The Patriot. They wind up finally in a place that seems like Egypt, complete with what appears to be a pyramid being built some thousands of years before historians tell us that happened, but hey, who knows?

As for the women, we see about three of them. Apparently, their main role was to stir the courage of young men (or the loins of older men) or to serve as seers. The plot’s reliance on the gifts of one such sorceress is perhaps the thing that I found most tedious about the tale, but I admit I have a low threshold for such fancies. Ultimately, 10,000 BC is best enjoyed as a special-effects spectacle, like Emmerich's contemporary films, only with the characters using dialogue like “I am through with days.”

IMDB link

viewed 3/8/08; reviewed 3/17/08