Buy 10,000 B.C. on DVD

10,000 B.C.

DVD Dual More Info Close Caption: No Region Code: 1 UPC: 085391139683 Catalog #: DD2636562 Languages: English Dolby Digital 5.1 (Primary)	Usually ships in 5-10 days	$17.99 (10% off) List Price: ~~$19.99~~
Blu-ray More Info Close Caption: No Region Code: 1 UPC: 085391139676 Catalog #: DB2636563 Languages: English Dolby Digital 5.1 (Primary)	Usually ships in 5-10 days	$32.99 (8% off) List Price: ~~$35.99~~

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From the liner notes

When savages capture and enslave his beloved Evolet (Camilla Belle), D'Leh (Steven Strait) discovers that it's his destiny to travel across harsh terrain and lead a revolution to free her and all the people of the land.

2 Reasons To buy this film

The wooly mammoths are cool
The saber-toothed tiger is cool

Review

There's no doubt that Roland Emmerich knows how to deliver a spectacle. Independence Day brings massive destruction, neat aliens and snappy wisecracking together so skillfully that, over a decade later, we take its craftsmanship for granted. Maybe Emmerich takes it for granted too, as he now seems to be running on fumes, cribbing liberally from past epics and slapping it together in a most perfunctory way. It's enough to remind you that Emmerich also brought us the remake of Godzilla.

Our reluctant hero is D'Leh (Steven Strait), an orphaned mountain tribesman who falls for a blue-eyed girl (Camilla Belle). She tells of four-legged demons who ransacked her town, and are eventually coming to get them as well. Unfortunately for us, these demons are merely Mongol-shaded despots, enslaving people to create a prototypical Mayan empire. For an ad campaign that focuses on wooly mammoths, saber-toothed tigers and vicious giant emus, it's distressing that not only are these the only creatures who appear in the movie, but their total screen time is somewhere under 10 minutes. That leaves a lot of time to think about other films that did this stuff better, from Mayan adventure (Apocalypto) to slave rebellions (Ben-Hur) to tribal war (Braveheart). Emmerich may think he's being clever by including specific visual references to these films (as well as Alien), but he's only making 10,000 B.C. look even more like a B-movie in comparison.

-- David Gorgos