If nothing else, Roland Emmerich's 10,000 B.C. will vault Camilla Belle into the rarified realm of antediluvian Miss Universes, a club that includes Daryl Hannah (Clan of the Cave Bear), Rae Dawn Chong (Quest for Fire) and Raquel Welch (One Million Years B.C.). With her blue eyes, ringlet hair and prehistoric pushup she's a fetching sight, so much so that when she's kidnapped from her village by equestrian marauders, a posse sets out to fetch her back.
There are other women in her tribe, but Belle's character, Evolet, is one-of-a-kind, a sort of stone-age Smurfette. Setting out in pursuit of her captors are D'Leh (who I presume got his name by always being late), Tic'Tic (pointing at his wrist and telling D'Leh to hurry up), Ka'Ren (anything to get away from the constant teasing for having a girl's name) and Baku, because every hunting party needs a young, impulsive kid who refuses to stay home.
Before the chase begins, however, we are treated to the spectacle of the tribe killing one of the giant furry elephants of the time, clearly a mammoth undertaking. As one of the huge beasts breaks free of its restraints and drags a horde of hunters across the tundra, you can almost imagine the theme-park ride it might one day inspire. It's such a manly, chest-thumping event that it seems destined to be followed by a quest for beer, if only the foreign invaders didn't spoil the day by ransacking the village.
10,000 B.C. has some superficial similarities to Mel Gibson's Apocalypto (Emmerich also directed Gibson in 2000's The Patriot), although one major difference is the decision to have the main characters speak in modern English. This lets them do a bit of florid deathbed moralizing; life may be nasty, brutish and short, but not so short that you couldn't get a few words in before breathing your last. It also makes D'Leh and his kin by far the most sympathetic lot in the film, since the invaders (who look disturbingly Arabic) are forced to speak in subtitles and never evolve beyond two-dimensional villains.
As in Gibson's movie, there are animal attacks at regular intervals, although by moving the action back 11,500 years, Emmerich and co-writer Harald Kloser can employ such late-Pleistocene megafauna as sabre-toothed tigers and something called a terror bird, which looks like a very large, very angry dodo. (This may explain why we exterminated that species in the 1600s; payback!) Another similarity is the use of giant pyramids, which I first took to be the ones still standing today until I realized they wouldn't be built for at least another 7,000 years – but hey, what's a few millennia between friends?
None of the actors are very well known, although Cliff Curtis as Tic'Tic has a body of work that includes Live Free or Die Hard, Sunshine and Whale Rider; and Steven Strait (D'Leh) is lead singer in a band called (how perfect is this?) Tribe. Together they raise a rabble of similarly downtrodden farmers and hunter-gatherers for a final assault on the pyramids, whose construction is overseen by a shadowy figure believed to have come from outer space, or perhaps Atlantis. (These conspiracy theories go way back.) They do a good enough job dodging bad guys and sabre-tooths, but it's difficult to get too invested in their quest. Worse, the action takes place before the invention of the one-liner, so the quips are not nearly as sharp as the spears.
A bit of unnecessary narration by the great Omar Sharif fails to lend much gravitas to the tale, while the prospect of the tribe's wise old matriarch sitting at home and somehow following the action in her mind's eye proved to be only a detraction. Several times, her startled reactions to eye-rolling events on the screen only convinced me she was watching a different, far more exciting movie than this one. Perhaps she's looking into the far future and catching a glimpse of Emmerich's next film, the similarly named 2012, coming to theatres in 2009. That's AD.
