by Paul Cook

Created on: June 05, 2010

Roland Emmerich, the director behind the alien invasion epic Independence Day brings us an all new $75 million sabre-toothed, mammoth-stomping action adventure. With its plentiful bag of historical inaccuracies, 10,000 BC is a good contender for biggest, dumbest movie of 2008, competing fiercely with Rambo of course.

Let’s get the good stuff out of the way first. Visually, the film is spectacular bar the odd horribly obvious green-screen background or two. The final scene is something to behold, giant mammoths traipsing up and down ‘The Almighty’s’ pyramid, huge ships on the river behind, a shining gold pyramid-top being craned onto the gigantic construction and thousands of highly realistic CGI people behind the scenes. The acting on the whole is also impressive given the fact it’s a relatively unknown cast, much like 300 without the giant, bellowing Gerard Butler. Instead the characters are humanised and relatable in 10,000 BC which works to a certain extent in that it makes this a little less of a “big, dumb blockbuster” than the director’s previous films, but is this what we really want? The big blockbuster epic we’re all used to is all about big, silly effects and stunts and without them something definitely feels amiss.

Unfortunately, the film is extremely repetitive and feels much like an hour long TV drama than a 2 hour long epic. Thin on the ground in terms of qualitative subject matter it makes up for it by repeatedly showing the film’s two main protagonists in a series of montages crossing mountain tops and hills. The story is also horribly predictable, at each turn in the plot any regular Hollywood moviegoer will find themselves knowing what will happen next. The climax is also somewhat of an anti-climax in terms of how the narrative is resolved. Yes we get the huge aerial shot over the building of the pyramid and the dozens of woolly mammoth barging through several hundreds of enslavers, but besides this all we get is a typical, standard Hollywood ending in which the guy gets the girl and so on and so forth. Don't worry about the spoiler, it's so predictable that you'll know this five minutes in.

Disappointing from an Independence Day fan’s perspective and failing to match the acting bravado of Will Smith and the awe-inspiring special effects of a city engulfed by a spaceship, Roland Emmerich newest Hollywood epic is only so by genre not by definition. The mammoths and the sabre-tooth tigers are worth going to see 10,000 BC for but don’t expect an enlightening or even satisfying story. 10,000 BC was also overshadowed by it's stiff competition in 2008 with Oscar-heavyweights No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood proving far too sophisticated and cinematically pleasing to warrant a second glance at 10,000 BC.

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