Apparently any shred of historical or geographical accuracy flies out the window when a film maker decides he or she wants to show of sweeping shots of mountain ranges or dazzle the audience with dazzling special effects. Well the old razzle dazzle doesn't work on this critic. Visual imagery only takes you so far, and it's not enough to cover the fact that the writing is dreadful and the whole plot doesn't make sense.

10,000 B.C. is set in the mountains (I'm assuming the Himalayas) and then all of a sudden, it's set in the jungle where giant do-do birds eat people, and then everyone is in what looks like the Sahara desert, and their journey ends in ancient Egypt where mastodons (or mammoths...I never could tell the difference) are enslaved along with hundreds of thousands of people to help build the pyramids. That's right, wooly elephants pulling giant blocks of limestone through the desert. This is toward the end of the film though, and it all starts with a prophecy – a tribe of people, led by the mystic Old Mother, find a young girl with blue eyes at the camp of a neighboring tribe that has been slaughtered by “four-legged demons.” Old Mother has a vision that this little girl will save their people one day. The girl, Evolet (Camilla Belle), is taken under the wing of Old Mother and falls in love with another outcast in the tribe, D'Leh (Steven Strait).

Evolet is captured by the four-legged demons when she is older, and D'Leh along with the tribe's leader and some others set off to rescue her and the other brothers and sisters that have been captured. So far things in the film make sense, even if they are a little ridiculous, but things quickly spiral out of control, and there are too many side-plots and strange creatures and crazy occurrences. The film just plain didn't make sense, and while some of the cinematography was gorgeous, it was poorly edited and poorly written overall. What really drives me crazy about films like this is they have a young actress with a huge amount of potential in a lead role, but she rarely has a line. All she really does is look frightened or beautiful or beautifully frightened throughout the entire movie.

The film is written and directed by Roland Emmerich, who also wrote and directed The Day After Tomorrow. The two films are very similar in that things are quaint and comfortable at the beginning, then some sort of horrible drama happens, then the main characters have to go on a long arduous journey, followed by the climactic struggle and of course, some sort of resolution. How the films differ is that at least The Day After Tomorrow made sense, and because of our world climate crisis it was a little easier to swallow eve though outrageous things were happening.

I think the real problem with this film is that there needed to be more focus. The plot was too complicated, so it made the film seem way longer than it was. There were too many side plots going on that made the main focus of the story seem watered down. If the film maker would have picked one aspect to focus on, one main story, it would have been a lot less exhausting and a lot easier to stomach.