10,000 BC

Sure, the special effects are top-notch in this movie. It looks great, with lots of sweeping, majestic vistas in addition to the wooly mammoths and the other SFX creatures. But I wasn’t sure about the story, which finds a young hunter from an oddly heterogeneous tribe (some of them look Caucasian, some Native American, some even a little Chinese) setting off on a quest to rescue the girl he loves from a gang of slavers who have carried her off, along with numerous others from the hero’s village. It’s a really generic set-up, and the rest of the movie doesn’t vary much from those constraints, either.

But somewhere along the way I got kind of caught up in it anyway and wound up enjoying it quite a bit. Forty-five or fifty years ago this would have been a cheaply-made drive-in movie rather than a big-budget special effects epic, but it still has a little of that good-hearted drive-in feel to it, especially in the scenes where the hero leads the slaves in an uprising against their evil masters. By the way, the origins of the bad guys are hinted at but not really resolved. Are they Egyptians, Atlanteans, space aliens . . . or all of the above?

Most of the complaints I’ve read about this movie say that it’s historically inaccurate. I’m not sure how much historical accuracy you can expect from a movie called 10,000 BC. The opening narration even makes a point of saying that some truths are lost to time. Anyway, here’s the way I look at it: You’ve got your sword fights, you’ve got your spears and arrows flying through the air, you’ve got noble, self-sacrificing heroes and sneeringly evil villains, you’ve got your giant birds, you’ve got two, count ‘em, two wooly mammoth stampedes . . . What the heck else do you want in a movie that’s just out to show you a good time? I think 10,000 BC succeeds admirably in that goal.