Movie Review: 10,000 avant J.-C.

By Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune Movie Critic

How to explain the agreeably boneheaded "10,000 B.C"? "Ice Age 2" may be more historically accurate. Actual young women circa 10,000 B.C. probably didn't wear enough eyeliner to have it dribble down their cheeks, discreetly, while heaving lovelorn sighs and uttering to their valiant men: "You came for me." Yet sometimes you have a hankering for a slab of 10,000-year-old cheese. Here it is, on a cracker.

Omar Sharif narrates, as if relaying a tale older and more revered than last year's cheese of choice, "300," by roughly 9,600 years. The time: 10,000 B.C., in a realm of momentous ecological change and enormous flightless prehistoric dinosaur birds out for blood, to say nothing of the science-fictionally scaled saber-toothed tigers, or the mammoths on which the Yagahl tribe subsists.

Steven Strait portrays the hunter-warrior-pinup boy D'Leh. Early on, the tribe's mystic, known as Old Mother, combines prophecy with a little matchmaking and deems D'Leh as the one who must carry the White Spear and protect the tribe from extinction, while fulfilling his destiny with the Blue-Eyed One (Camilla Belle, eyebrows apparently tweezed at some pricey 10,000 B.C. day spa).

This is a schlock epic, or "schlopic," that really gets around. Warmongering slave-raiders capture the Blue-Eyed One. D'Leh becomes a summer-intern Spartacus and convinces various other tribes to join his cause (the film could've been called "Quest for Ingenue") while coping with gargantuan prehistoric birds in the Lost Valley and spear-toothed kitties out on the plains. Eventually D'Leh crosses the Desert of Limitless Sand and reach a slave-fueled pyramid construction site, enough to bring tears to the eyes of both Donald Trump and Steve Wynn.

The whole saga plays like a five-DVD shuffle of "Apocalypto," "Ice Age," "Quest for Fire" and any two previous Roland Emmerich schlopics you can name. Director Emmerich gave the world "Stargate," "Independence Day," "The Patriot" and "The Day After Tomorrow," that last one being a five-DVD shuffle of "Earthquake," "The Towering Inferno," "Ice Age," "An Inconvenient Truth" and, for all I know, "Carnival in Flanders."

Emmerich has no time for poetry or magic, even when the director and his digital wizards (here doing wildly variable work) are trying to dazzle. He's a taskmaster and a field marshal, not a visionary. But I enjoyed "10,000 B.C." more and more, and more than just about anything Emmerich's done before. The Teutonic solemnity of his mythmaking approach keeps everyone in line. The crowd may chuckle at the eyeliner down the cheeks of the Blue-Eyed One. But what's a schlopic without such felicities?

MPAA rating: PG-13 (for sequences of intense action and violence).

Running time: 1:48.

Starring: Steven Strait (D'Leh); Camilla Belle (Evolet); Cliff Curtis (Tic'Tic).

Directed by Roland Emmerich; screenplay by Emmerich and Harald Kloser; photographed by Ueli Steiger; edited by Alexander Berner; production design by Jean-Vincent Puzos; music by Kloser and Thomas Wander; produced by Michael Wimer, Mark Gordon and Emmerich. A Warner Bros. release.