From director Roland Emmerich comes a sweeping odyssey into a mythical age of prophesies and gods, when spirits rule the land and mighty mammoths shake the earth.
Roland Emmerich is a genius: In an age where Hollywood has all but lost its sense of lavish spectacle, Emmerich is an old ringmaster who sets up his big top of audacious absurdity and puts on a grand show every season; sure, the circus has its fair share of cringe worthy clowns and razzle dazzle em' distractions but at least you leave with the sense that Emmerich, if nothing else, was at least trying to entertain his audience. '10,000 BC' sees our man dust off the old Joseph Campbell routine with an all action prehistoric adventure that's a poor man's 'Apocalypto' meets 'Dawson's Creek' via 'One Million Years B.C.' by way of 'Marvel' comics Savage Land, and though that might sound like an exceptionally bad combination, it actually works quite well. Evolet (fit Camille Bell) and D'Leah (buff Steven Strait) are the Pebbles & Bam Bam of '10,000 B.C.' thus when Evolets held captive by a marauding tribe of slave-masters; its up to our novice hero to rescue her, build an indigenous army as he goes along, herd some woolly mammoths, befriend a sabre tooth tiger and, just for fun, drastically alter the very pattern of civilisation itself. Not bad for someone who looks like he just stumbled off a GAP ad. Living legend Omar Sharif adds some much needed gravitas with his weighty voiceover, in fact, it was Sharif's narration that reminded me of another great movie Emmerich tries, albeit unsuccessfully, to rip off: 'The 13th Warrior'. Now to cite this film's historical inaccuracies would only serve to suggest you've never seen a an Emmerich picture before, after all, he's the Cecil B (movie) DeMille of modern day Hollywood: You mean to tell me that Egyptian Sun god Ra didn't have an alien armada at his disposal or that Mel Gibson didn't single-handedly drive the British Empire out of North America? Nonsense. Every plot twist can be seen a mile off, whilst 'surprise' revelations thunder by with all the subtly of two Mammoths trying to play hide and seek in your bedroom. If 'Stargate' was his best and 'Godzilla' his worst, then '10,000 B.C.' is Emmerich's most OK moment to date; closer in narrative drive to his underrated climate change film 'The Day After Tomorrow', though lacking any Lundgren vs. Van Damme or F-16 vs. UFO style set pieces which made cheese fests like 'Universal Soldier' and 'Independence Day' memorable. 'The Patriot' still outranks all other Emmerich movies in its sobriety, acting and visual splendour, nonetheless, if its bozo B.C. action you're after and you liked Stephen Sommer's 'The Mummy' / 'Scorpion King' universe, then '10,000 B.C.' is one to watch.
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Epic adventure from director Roland Emmerich. In a remote mountain tribe, the young hunter D'Leh (Steven Strait) has met the woman of his dreams, the beautiful Evolet (Camilla Belle). But when a band of mysterious warlords raid his village and kidnap Evolet, D'Leh must lead a small group of hunters to pursue the warlords to the end of the world to save her. As they venture into unknown lands for the first time, the group discovers there are civilisations beyond their own and that mankind's reach is far greater than they ever knew.
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