Box Office Movie

Wooly mammoths help build pyramids in ancient Egypt, prehistoric humans wear Bob Marley dreads, the good guys are various shades of black and brown while the bad guys are Caucasian—clearly, the B.C. here stands for Benetton Colors, since it’s got nothing to do real history.

Touted as a fable right from the start, with a heavy accented Omar Sharif genially narrating like an uncle at bedtime, this would-be epic from the bombastic Roland Emmerich—basically Michael Bay with fewer explosions—is a standard coming-of-age, baptism-of-fire story that crosses eras and climates in a mishmash reminiscent of his Stargate (1994) but with less plausibility. Yes, a molecular rearranger that spits you through black holes is more plausible that what we have here.

The storyteller framing of 10,000 BC is an attempt to transcend such stick-in-the-mud concerns and give this the patina of legend, but it’s ultimately just a way to try to justify what must have been a pitch like, “Oooh, you know what’d be cool? Cavemen hunting mammoths! And mammoths stampeding! And, uh, what can we do to top that? I got it! A big finish in ancient Egypt where we can have mammoths stampede around pyramids!!” I must admit the mammoths are amazing—even if you do keep thinking of Ray Romano’s Manny in Ice Age the first time you see one, since they’re both computer-animated after all.

In the craggy, snowy wilds of what one would guess to be Europe, judging from the horses that show up later, a small tribe of apparently Native American Rastafarians await the annual arrival of mammoths to hunt for food. With their dialogue translated into some nobly accented English (other tribes’ languages are subtitled), the group takes in a blue-eyed girl whose own tribe has been slaughtered. She grows up to be the lovely Evolet (Camilla Belle), who falls in love with D’Leh (Steven Strait), a young man sort of ostracized by the other young men—they just treat him a little mean, basically—because his father had evidently abandoned the tribe many years before. But D’Leh’s surrogate father Tic’Tic (Cliff Curtis) knows better.

Vicious slavers on horseback eventually carry off Evolet and others, and D’Leh leads a small group across terrain that changes from snowcapped mountains to jungle, to savannah and to desert a lot faster than you’d think anybody could walk. And they evidently found a prehistoric Stargate somewhere, since they somehow jump from snowy Europe to sub-Saharan Africa before walking back up to Egypt. Then 10,000 BC becomes a prison-escape movie. You know—the kind where our heroes sneak up behind the one Nazi guarding the prisoners, snap his neck and then break in to convince the prisoners that they need an uprising.

Overall, it’s risible. Situated between the anthropological Quest for Fire (1981) and the agonizingly awful The 13th Warrior (1999), 10,000 BC is just anthropologically agonizing.

Critic: Frank Lovece