10,000 BC
“Let My People Go”, yelled the Stone-Age Moses

Rushing over to the cinema without reading anything about the movie you’re about to see can lead to some amusing, yet unfounded, expectations. In the weeks leading to “10,000 BC“’s opening weekend I was sure this was Roland Emmerich remaking Hammer Studio’s Ray Harryhausen (or Raquel Welch, depending on what kind of film geek you are) dinosaur flic, “One Million Years BC”. How shocked was I to realize I wasn’t even close. Instead, Emmerich remakes Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto”, with a plot that is almost identical, though lacking in “Apocalypto”’s bravura filmmaking (plus off-shooting the time period in some 11,500 years). Though many expect “10,000 BC” to do big business stateside this weekend, I see this one tanking like a woolly mammoth with a spear through its heart. For anyone trying to compare “10,000 BC”’s commercial prospects to previous springtime hits such as “300″ (the CGI-laden historic adventure epic) or “Ice Age” (another woolly mammoth starrer), I have only two words to say: “Rapa Nui“.

In “10,000 BC” an Epipaleolithic era young warrior (Steven Strait) sets out to save his loved one (Camilla Bell) - looking like a de-freckled Lindsay Lohan who’s been outcast from ” The Village of the Damned” - who has been captured by slave traders. Before they part he quotes from Michael Mann’s “The Last of the Mohicans” to her, promising he will find her. By journey’s end our reluctant hero will discover he’s the star of three different prophecies for three different tribes and cultures. Although alarmingly, none of these prophecies warned him of how slow and boring his story would be, before getting into three or four decent set-pieces, that arrive too late to save the movie from crumbling under its own weight.

Warner Brothers would have you believe that “10,000 BC” is this year’s “300″. It’s not. I was enormously entertained by “300″’s vision of mythology, turned into a campy rock opera, that was as ironically filled with over the top tongue-in-cheek self referential humor as it was stunning to watch. But “10,000 BC” is completely devoid of any humor and takes itself way too seriously for its own good. And this coming from someone who had a blast with “The Day After Tomorrow”. It’s Emmerich’s The Day Before Yesterday that I found to be a grandiose bore.

As the film’s title establishes WHEN it is happening, there is still the mystery of the WHERE. Logic places the film’s plot in Africa. Starting at the lush south, traveling north then following the Nile into Egypt where the pyramids are built. This makes sense since Emmerich has even enlisted Egyptian born actor Omar Shariff to serve as the film’s narrator. But when our posse gets attacked by a flock of Phorusrhacids (aka terror birds) I lost track of time and place: not only were terror-birds (honestly, they should star in a movie of their own) found only in South America, but they were also extinct nearly 2 million years before the movie’s self proclaimed timeline. Which made me wonder whether our heroes crossed over Emmerich’s Stargate - another movie obsessed with Pharoas and Pyramids - and jumped back and forth continents and millenia.