10,000 BC

first off, let me say i am a fan of Roland Emmerich's films like Independence Day,The Patriot etc. but this film is beyond a doubt the most grueling and awful test of patience i have ever endured . time stopped and i got a serious headache after watching this garbage. a $75,000,000 budget and you get poor actors and cgi from TV's "charmed". the "tiger" in Ice Age looked more real and even more menacing than the kitten that was in this movie no longer than 3 minutes. i thought the trailer looked good and went in the theater with an open mind . i am amazed by how bad it was . AMAZED! Come to think of it, i remember being more entertained watching paint dry!

To anyone who has ever yearned to see woolly mammoths in full stampede across the Alps, 10,000 BC can be heartily recommended. There's also a flock of "terror birds"--lethal ostriches on steroids--in a steaming jungle only a splice away from the heroes' snow-dusted alpine habitat. And lo, somewhere in the vastness of the North African desert lies a city whose slave inhabitants alternately teem like the crowds in Quo Vadis during the burning of Rome and trudge in hieratic ally menacing formations like the workers in Metropolis. That's pretty much it for the cool stuff. Setting movies in prehistoric times is dicey. Apart from the "Dawn of Man" sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, only Quest for Fire makes the grade, and its creators had the good sense to limit the duologue to grunts and moans. 10,000 BC boasts a quasi-biblical narrator (Omar Sharif) and characters who speak in formed, albeit uninteresting, sentences--including a New Age–y "I understand your pain." But let no one say the storytelling isn't primitive. The narrator speaks of "the legend of the child with the blue eyes" and bingo, here's the kid now. When, grown up to be Camilla Belle, she's carried off by "four-legged demons"--guys on horseback to you--the neighbor boy (Steven Strait) who hankers to make myth with her leads a rescue mission into the great unknown world beyond their mountaintop. His name is D'Leh, which is Held, the German for "knight," spelled backward. So yes, there is some hidden meaning after all. 10,000 BC is the latest triumph of the ersatz from writer-director Roland Emmerich. Like Stargate (1994), Independence Day (1996), and The Day After Tomorrow (2004) before it, it's shamelessly cobbled together out of every movie Emmerich can remember to pilfer from (though to be fair, the section in per-ancient Egypt harks back to his own Stargate). Emmerich's saving grace is that his films' cheesiness is so flagrant, his narratives so geared for instant gratification, he can seem like a kid simultaneously improvising and acting out a story in his backyard: "P'tend there's this alien ... p'tend maybe he came from Atlantis or something...." Just don't p'tend it has anything to do with real movie-making.

Starring: Steven Strait, Camilla Belle, Cliff Cirtus, Joel Virgel. Director: Roland Emmerich.

I expected this movie to suck. I thought it would be an adrenaline ride with no plot that you can only fully appreciate if you see it in Imax 3-D - similar to (but worse than) Beowulf. Especially since it had gotten really terrible reviews and everyone who'd seen it told me not to waste the few bucks it would cost to rent it.

Well, I finally shelled out the money, and was pleasantly surprised to find that it was not only as exciting as the trailers promised, it did have a plot and was enjoyable. I will not pretend that it was a brilliant movie, because it just wasn't. It definitely had the premise of what could've been a triumph, but it just couldn't cut it.

There was some cheesy dialog, but mostly it was pretty original. The plot was something that could've been ripped off from any ancient folktale, but I think that the scriptwriters and directors did a decent job of making it their own. Seeing as it's supposed to be a legend, and proves itself to be more of a fantasy than historical epic, the historical inaccuracies can be forgiven.

All in all, it was a fairly good movie that was both thrilling and enjoyable. I can see why people didn't like it, but, honestly, they're being much too tough on it.

I was hoping to like this movie, to give it a better review than most might give it....but I couldn't. In the end, I had to agree with the reviewers here on IMDb, that this movie stinks. It's true.

It's also one of those films that starts off okay, lures you in, and then deteriorates. With 40 minutes to go in the two-hour film, you're ready to walk out but since you've invested 80 minutes you figure, "I might as well see it through the end." The last half hour then becomes like a session at the dentist's office in which you can't wait for the experience to be over.

Credibility is probably the worst aspect of this film. Seeing people 10,000 years ago in buildings that look pretty well-made and would do an architect proud today, and hearing people speak with British and other assorted accents - in the same tribe - for the time and place (Mideast or Northern Africa in 10,000 B.C.) almost makes one laugh out loud in spots.....yet this is supposed to be a serious movie. The special-effects were weak, especially with the saber-toothed tiger which not only looks very fake but is proportionally ludicrous. The mammoths didn't look at hokey, but they moved very woodenly, computer-like. This was mainly the reason I watched. I knew it might be stupid but I thought it might at least be fun with eye-popping effects. No, nothing was eye-popping here.

It was just dumb....and I didn't even get to the story part, if you want to call it that. Actually, that was the worst part of this film. The screenplay was embarrassingly bad. If you want details on the holes in this story and all the things that were impossible but shown here, check out the other reviews.

Folks: you can believe all the negative reviews here on IMDb. They are not lying.

Although well shot in front of gorgeous vistas, on location in New Zealand, Namibia, and South Africa, 10,000 BC is just another loud, dumb, and eminently pointless CGI adventure from the tactless, talentless, hacky direction of Roland Emmerich.There’s a plot, believe it or not, something about the true love between some tribesman and a hot chick, set in the very distant past, and these rampaging marauders attack their peaceful prehistoric-era tribe and carry off the womenfolk, so our hero spends the next two hours of movie time trying to get her back.

But who cares, right? No one in his right mind would watch a Roland Emmerich movie for the plot. The man brought us Godzilla, Independence Day, and The Day after Tomorrow, after all. No, your focus here is supposed to be on the prehistoric-ness of the thing, like the wild, carnivorous birds, or the mastodons, or the sabre-tooth tigers. Oh, and the smoldering hotness of lurve that Our Hero and His Love can barely contain.

Your first clue that this won’t be much more than a silly bore is the simple fact that our noble hunters speak perfect, inflectionless English. No idea why. I’m not the biggest fan of subtitles, granted, but I think here they at least would have made sense. Instead, we have these perfectly coiffed young people with gleaming white teeth - as any prehistoric hunter would have - speaking the Queen’s English to each other. It’s bizarre and off-putting. These cool kids look like they fell out of a Gap commercial; they’d be dead in minutes if they actually had to fend for themselves on a tundra or in the jungle. They’re as believable as Ed Begley, Jr. at a biker rally. Which is not very believable.

And it’s not as if they get clever, intelligent dialog to mouth. D’Leh (heh, sounds like Delay) tells a vicious, trapped sabre-tooth tiger, “Do not eat me when I set you free!” See, because he doesn’t want to be eaten, and he figures that reasoning with the beast will do the trick. D’Leh, played by newcomer Steven Strait, is sort of a poor man’s Colin Farrell, complete with otherworldly eyebrows. He wants you to think he’s earnest and sincere, but instead you think he’s vapid and vain. Crazy! (”Do not eat me when I set you free!” That’s hilarious right there. Why, it’s right up there with “Throw me the whip, and I’ll throw you the idol!”) Besides, this whole pursuing-the-savages-who-stole-our-people thing was done much better only a few years ago in Mel Gibson’s Apocalpyto. Now, you might not buy into the notion of using an ancient Mayan dialect in a movie, but at least it made some sense. Using that dialect, with subtitles, there was a real sense of adventure and tragedy; here, the fluid English feels woefully inept and completely anachronistic.

Unlike Apocalypto, there’s scant fighting and mayhem here. The tribe (like that in Apocalypto) is a hunting tribe, so that explains why for much of the movie they run and hide and duck and cover. I will find you! What’s his name cries. And then he finds her and then loses her again, and he says, I’ll come back! And then he spends the next hour or so trying to find her. His One True Love is like a set of pretty car keys.

Back to that tiger, which makes a couple of appearances. Now, I like CGI as much as the next guy. It can very easily enhance a scene, make the unrealistic seem obvious and believable. But this tiger reminded me of the cyclops and other fantastical creatures you’d see in those old fifties Greek-epic movies, the ones featuring the work of the great Ray Harryhausen - basically, essentially, stop-motion animation. And that looks crappy here in good ol’ 2008.

10,000 BC isn’t meant to be a historical epic - the year 10,000 BC is used here merely to connote a Long Time Ago - which is fine in and of itself, but really isn’t anything compelling about it other than its setting. It’s predictable pap without much of a heart, instilling no compassion or feeling from its audience.