10,000 B.C.: Critic Reviews

Neither grand enough to be impressive nor antic enough to be charming, the movie settles for bland and frantic, climaxing in a showdown among decadent pyramid builders.

It's best not to think too hard about anything in 10,000 BC, a sublimely dunderheaded excursion into human prehistory.

Roland Emmerich's great big CGI blockbuster lumbers along like one of the woolly mammoths that roam across the screen.

Even a cameo by Pauly Shore in Encino Man would liven up this bombastic bore.

One part Joseph Campbell hero quest, one part multi-culti morality tale, one part live-action Flintstones cartoon, 10,000 B.C. is finally every part just plain nuts.

[I] saith to you that I had a strangely good time, and whether that is from laughing at 10,000 B.C. or laughing with it I knoweth not, although I strongly suspect the former.

The less said about historical accuracy, the better.

The mammoths are cool. The squealing killer ostriches, perhaps inspired by ancient phorusrhacid fossils, are idiotic but... okay, they're idiotic.

You may be expecting a showcase of cutting-edge visuals -- isn't the appeal of the title the implicit promise of seeing a lost world re-created to presumably dazzling effect? But for the most part, it's just barren landscapes and people in animal skins.

Sometimes you have a hankering for a slab of 10,000-year-old cheese. Here it is, on a cracker.

Overblown and stupefyingly dull.

Would that Emmerich took as much care with his human characters as with inanimate objects and CGI animals.

In the realm of heroic historical loincloth adventures, 10,000 is much less than 300.

Barney Rubble had a lot more charisma than anyone involved in this movie.

Conventional where it should be bold and mild where it should be wild, 10,000 BC reps a missed opportunity to present an imaginative vision of a prehistoric moment.

While the special effects are top notch... the humans are dull, the dialogue is ridiculous, and anyone expecting a repeat of the action in 300 is going to be sorely disappointed with this bloodless PG-13 adventure.

Where's Raquel Welch in that fur bikini?

This much-delayed film cries out for consideration for Worst CGI, Most Annoying Narrator, Lamest Dialogue and Dumbest Action Hero.

If you thought 300 was silly, think of 10,000 BC as 33.333 times sillier.

10,000 BC would be much better if it allowed itself the freedom to be kitsch.

Rather than taking the trouble to imagine what early civilization might have been like -- its culture, its language, its warfare, its family life -- the movie simply transposes a banal Hollywood epic into Paleolithic times.

10,000 B.C. isn't only brain-dead, it's completely dead. It's inert and without a heartbeat.

Digital imagery imagines a striking prehistoric world for these back-to-basics heroes, villains and raging beasts.

A mix of vast CGI spectacle and small, silly moments, the prehistoric saga 10,000 BC is an epic in name only.

The best acting comes from woolly mammoths, man-eating ostriches and a saber-toothed tiger -- and those babies are digital. It's the human actors who look fake.