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The film lacks anything resembling a satisfying payoff in other areas, too. There is a strong hint that the figure who lives within the temple and claims to be a god—he is called "the Almighty"—might have come from Atlantis. But when this god-figure finally faces D'Leh and his people, the confrontation is resolved all too quickly, and underwhelmingly, and the hints about his past are ignored entirely.

Well, we can certainly say this film had a mammoth budget

Beyond the plot, the film is disappointing on technical and artistic grounds, too. The computer-generated mammoths are a sight to behold, but the sabre-toothed cat seems fake; and when D'Leh and his allies start a mammoth stampede on the temple's construction site, the film relies too much on sweeping aerial images that, instead of impressing us, detach us from the action on the ground. (Peter Jackson used computer-generated aerial shots to give us a sense of the scale of the battles being fought in Middle-Earth, but he didn't skimp on the live-action stuff.)

The film is directed by Roland Emmerich from a script he wrote with Harald Kloser—a composer with a couple decades' experience who has never dabbled before in any other aspect of filmmaking apart from the soundtrack—and at times it brings to mind bits of Emmerich's earlier films, from the sand-strewn settings of Stargate to the laughably anachronistic dialogue of The Patriot. The disappointing thing about 10,000 B.C. is not that an Emmerich film is cheesy, or that a film set in prehistoric times is so obviously unhistorical; that much is to be expected, and possibly even enjoyed. It is that a film promising spectacle and action fails to deliver all that much of either, and ends up being so dull it can't even be enjoyed for its camp value.

Talk About It

1. D'Leh worries that he does not "deserve" to be called courageous for killing the mammoth, because he killed it partly by accident. What would you have said to him? Do you think he showed any courage during the hunt? Enough to feel proud of?
2. Tic'Tic says, "A prophecy has many faces, many ways of coming true." Do you agree? What sorts of prophecies can come true in only one way? What sorts allow for a range of possible fulfillments? Can you find examples of both in the Bible?
3. Tic'Tic says at one point that one kind of good man "draws a circle" around himself that includes his family, and another kind draws a bigger circle that includes other people, and so on. What do you make of his analogy? Is it possible to draw the circle too narrowly, or too tightly? Is it possible to draw the circle too big? What if you look at the outer circles so much you lose sight of the people in the inner circles?

The Family Corner

10,000 B.C. is rated PG-13 for sequences of intense action and violence (lots of fight scenes with sticks and spears and occasional swords, most of it bloodless). As befits a tale set in pre-biblical times, the hero's tribe is pagan, venerating its dead "fathers" and following the guidance of an "old mother" who has prophetic visions. The villains, meanwhile, worship a man who lives in a temple and claims to be a god.

Photos © Copyright Warner Brothers

© Peter T. Chattaway subject to licensing agreement with Christianity Today International. All rights reserved. Click for reprint information.

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