Special FX are cat's whiskers

Mar 14 2008 By Graham Young

10,000 BC (12A)

VERDICT: *

REMEMBER Roland Emmerich?

He's the German writer-director who made a headline film every two years in the '90s but has now dropped back to one every four.

After Universal Soldier in 1992, we then had the biennial releases of Star-gate, Independence Day, Godzilla and The Patriot.

Apart from Mel Gibson in the latter, they were all Bmovies with state-of-theart special effects, a feat repeated with The Day After Tomorrow in 2004.

So far, so good.

Alas, 10,000 BC is a flashback in time all right - to 1990 when Emmerich's Moon 44 was just about the worst movie of the year.

This is so equally dull, it had me wondering...

Is 10,000 BC a binary code with a comma - or is it predicting 10,000 Bored Cinemagoers?

And yet, despite the in-built tedium of the over-long 109-minute story, some of the special effects are sensational.

Watching a herd of charging mammoths with hunters dodging between them makes you appreciate just how far we've come since Jurassic Park 15 years ago.

And, with Emmerich's regular collaborator, Ueli Steiger, on cinematography, a vast pyramid construction site is also wondrous to behold.

But the story which holds it all together is unremittingly tedious, with Omar Sharif repeat-edly returning to continue his cliched narration.

As so often is the case, this lazy device is unsuccessfully used to try to paper over the gaping holes in the plot. Where's Horton when you need him?

The spoken language is English, but Mel Gibson's cinematic language was more successful in last year's subtitled Mayan adventure, Apocalypto.

When a beauty called Evolet (Camilla Belle / When a Stranger Calls) is kidnapped, her blue eyes are the motivation for D'Leh (Sky High's Steven Straight) to keep his wits about him.

Joined by other tribes who have been attacked, he ends up leading an army against the mysterious warlords who have proved there exists a world far beyond what he could have imagined.

But this is such a historical / geographical hotchpotch filmed (impossibly for the period) in New Zealand, South Africa and Namibia that few will care about what happens to either D'Leh or Evolet.

Nice sabre-toothed tiger, though.