USA today's Claudia Puig about the movie

Claudia Puig

Within a few minutes into the ponderous prehistoric pseudo-epic that is 10,000 B.C., you find yourself longing for George of the Jungle to crash into a tree or the Geico cavemen to amble up and put an end to the droning seriousness of this tedious tale. Heck, even a cameo by Pauly Shore in Encino Man would liven up this bombastic bore.

With a bevy of trendy dreadlock 'dos, well-toned bodies and an array of bad accents, the movie is like a satire waiting to happen.

It might have been worth seeing had the film been directed by Best in Show's Christopher Guest, rather than Godzilla's Roland Emmerich. Instead, we're expected to take seriously this unimaginative story of a son living out his absent father's dream. Perhaps a better title would have been Quest for Sire. Haven't we already seen far too many wannabe mythic stories of survival, featuring predictable attacks by human marauders and vicious giant beasts?

The only noteworthy elements are its computer-generated predators, such as the menacing saber-toothed tiger, and rampaging herds of woolly mammoths.

The visual sweep of desert landscapes, mountain ranges, verdant jungles and frozen tundra is spectacular. But the visuals aren't enough to make the experience compelling.

The actors might as well have been cardboard cutouts, given their limited range and interchangeability. Cliff Curtis (Whale Rider and Three Kings) has little to do here except work on his tan as he makes his way across land masses. He travels in the company of D'Leh (Steven Strait), a smoldering and hunky warrior intent on rescuing the mysterious blue-eyed girl he loves (Camilla Belle), believed to be either a sacred being or an evil witch, depending on your tribal membership.

The minimalist dialogue, mishmash of eras and scientific and historical inaccuracy are sure to elicit laughs. The whole enterprise grows tiresome with repeated scenes of onslaughts and foot chases, accompanied by a derivative score.

The film brings to mind Apocalypto, which, for all its brutality, was more riveting than this barbaric drag. The action is so plodding and the story so dreary that you feel as if you've lived through several millennia by the time it reaches its strained conclusion.

© Copyright 2008 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Los Angeles Times about the 10000 BC

Kenneth Turan

As far as writer-director Roland Emmerich is concerned, the Ice Age is a state of mind. Refusing to be tied down by either sense or sensibility, his 10,000 BC is as crazy as it wants to be, plundering the past and other movies with that peculiar Hollywood combination of the earnest and the preposterous that can result in the guiltiest of guilty pleasures.

Outrageous and outlandish, Emmerich's 10,000 BC is easy to mock, but it is so cheerfully shameless and terminally silly -- who knew that woolly mammoths were used to build the pyramids? -- that you have to admire its effrontery and accept its creator, the man behind Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, as a certified crackpot visionary.

Though perhaps initially inspired by the 1940 and 1967 versions of One Million BC, the first starring Victor Mature, the second, Raquel Welch, 10,000 BC has gone beyond those films' simple story of the humble Shell people and the hostile Rock people and into the wild blue yonder. As Emmerich's co-writer, Harald Kloser, archly puts it, "Roland and I never intended for 10,000 BC to be a documentary."

What that means in practice is that 10,000 BC envisions the icy environs of the late Pleistocene epoch as a place that people could simply walk out of if they had the requisite gumption and a heck of a good reason to hit the trail.

Our hero, the hunter D'Leh (Steven Strait), has both. But it's the fate of his beloved Evolet (Camilla Belle, very far from costarring with Daniel Day-Lewis in the indie film The Ballad of Jack and Rose), kidnapped by a band of marauding slave traders known as "four-legged demons" because they come on horseback, that provides the clincher.

So D'Leh, who's never recovered from the youthful disappearance of his father, plus the great hunter and sage Tic'Tic (I'm not making up these names) and two others of the intrepid Yagahl tribe begin walking the walk. After the ice and snow give out, the Yagahl suddenly enter a sweltering jungle where they are attacked by what appears to be a flock of enormous and quite hostile chickens.

This Lost Valley for some reason contains an African tribe called the Naku, whose numbers have been similarly diminished by the slavers. Uniting with them and other local tribes, D'Leh and Tic'Tic (the Australian veteran Cliff Curtis) now have to cross an enormous desert. At the end of that is a proto-Egyptian civilization, in love with pyramids and run by an effete priestly class with long fingernails and a fondness for slavery and human sacrifice.

If those evil folk sound suspiciously like refugees from Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, that's not the only movie 10,000 BC plunders. There's a sequence with a saber-toothed tiger inspired by the beloved Androcles and the Lion and an overall sensibility that echoes adventure films like the H. Rider Haggard-based King Solomon's Mines and She.

More than anything, 10,000 BC is an updated version of those old Saturday matinee action films and serials, filled with hair-breadth escapes, wild coincidences, things foretold by ancient prophecy and mysterious places such as the Mountain of the Gods, from which "no one has ever returned." And that doesn't even get into the legendary White Spear and the wise shaman called Old Mother who knows all about it.

Yes, the film has so much up-to-the-minute, cost-is-no-object computer-generated imagery that we can practically smell the fetid breath of the herds of woolly mammoths that are much given to fierce stampeding. But the film's heart is in its throwback innocence, its determinedly old-fashioned story of a young love that will not die and a young man who is a hero in the making but doesn't know it.

Almost alone in films intended for a young demographic, the PG-13 10,000 BC determinedly avoids profanity, excessive gore and profane humor. It even employs Omar Sharif to read a pious voice-over that relies on sentiments like "only time can teach us what is truth and what is legend." The oracle has spoken.

Copyright 2008 Los Angeles Times

10000 before christ (10000 b.c) - the movie

The movie was launched 03.07.2008 in United States

The story plot:
In the year 10,000 B.C., a hunter (Steven Strait) loses his woman (Camilla Belle) to an evil warlord, so he gathers together a massive army to cross the wilderness fighting all manner of man and beast to find a lost civilization and mount a daring rescue.

Overview

Director:Roland Emmerich
Writers: Roland Emmerich (written by) & Harald Kloser (written by)

Genre: Adventure / Drama more
Tagline: It takes a hero to change the world.

Plot Outline:
A prehistoric epic that follows a young mammoth hunter's journey through uncharted territory to secure the future of his tribe.

The movie length is 109 minutes, and was Rated PG-13 for sequences of intense action and violence.

The language of the movie: English