10, 000 BC

For all my dislike of Roland Emmerich's 2012, I actually quite enjoyed his previous film, 10 000 BC. You can't take it seriously of course, it's a pretty disposable piece of fluff, but I thought it was passable piece of mindless fun and it didn't really have any aspirations to be anything other than a low brow big budget fantasy-adventure.

D'Leh (Steven Strait) is a young buck of a European caveman who follows a band of horseriding warriors halfway across the globe to rescue the love of his loins, Evolet (Camilla Bell). He gets in adventures with mammoths, giant flightless birds, sabretooth tigers, rival tribes and a Egyptian-like civilisation built on slavery.

It's an incredibly stupid film, anyone with even a passing knowledge of history will probably find it infuriating - the film depicts a group of Alps-dwelling cavemen who seem to travel on foot all the way to what appears to be Africa. They then encounter a proto-Egyptian civilisation, with the film falgrantly and proudly disregarding any semblance of established history or accuracy. My advice to anyone attempting to watch this film is to simply leave your brain at the door.

Just watch it for the cool prehistoric animals such as Wooly Mammoth and rampaging Elephant Birds. It actually probably would've been a superior film if Emmerich hadn't bothered with dialogye. Imagine that! A serious full-blown CGI epic with cavemen fighting prehistoric monsters, but with no speaking. It would've been awesome. Instead it's just a bit of big dumb fun.

DIRECTOR: Roland Emmerich
WRITER/SOURCE: Roland Emmerich, Harold Kloser
KEY ACTORS: Steven Strait, Camilla Bell, Cliff Curtis, Joel Virgil, Marco Kham, Omar Shariff

RELATED TEXTS:
- The civilisation-built-on-slavery theme was explored somewhat more realistically (and gorily) in the recent film Apocalypto.
- The most famous cavemen films are arguably One Million B.C. (1940) and it's British remake, One Million B.C. (1966), both of which feature prehistoric humans co-existing with dinosaurs - a very historically inaccurate gaff.
- The Clan of the Cave Bear, the first of six linked-novels by Jean Auel, is probably the most famous text that deals with prehistoric human life. It was also made into a film in the mid-80s.
- Year One is a biblical-caveman comedy starring Jack Black and Michael Cera that was made the year after 10, 000 BC.