Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9118 in DVD
• Released on: 2008-07-21
• Rating: Suitable for 12 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
• Formats: PAL, Dolby, Digital Sound, Widescreen
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 104 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
To anyone who has ever yearned to see woolly mammoths in full stampede across the Alps, 10,000 BC can be heartily recommended. There's also a flock of "terror birds" (lethal ostriches on steroids) in a steaming jungle only a splice away from the heroes' snow-dusted alpine habitat. And lo, somewhere in the vastness of the North African desert lies a city whose slave inhabitants alternately teem like the crowds in Quo Vadis during the burning of Rome and trudge in hieratically menacing formations like the workers in Metropolis. That's pretty much it for the cool stuff. Setting movies in prehistoric times is dicey. Apart from the "Dawn of Man" sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, only Quest for Fire makes the grade, and its creators had the good sense to limit the dialogue to grunts and moans. 10,000 BC boasts a quasi-biblical narrator (Omar Sharif) and characters who speak in formed, albeit uninteresting, sentences (including a New Age–y "I understand your pain"). But let no one say the storytelling isn't primitive. The narrator speaks of "the legend of the child with the blue eyes" and bingo, here's the kid now. When, grown up to be Camilla Belle, she's carried off by "four-legged demons" (guys on horseback to you). The neighbour boy (Steven Strait) who hankers to make myth with her leads a rescue mission into the great unknown world beyond their mountaintop. His name is D'Leh, which is Held, the German for "knight," spelled backward. So yes, there is some hidden meaning after all.

10,000 BC is the latest triumph of the ersatz from writer-director Roland Emmerich. Like Stargate (1994), Independence Day (1996), and The Day After Tomorrow (2004) before it, it's shamelessly cobbled together out of every movie Emmerich can remember to pilfer from (though to be fair, the section in pre-ancient Egypt harks back to his own Stargate). Emmerich's saving grace is that his films' cheesiness is so flagrant, his narratives so geared for instant gratification, he can seem like a kid simultaneously improvising and acting out a story in his backyard: "P'tend there's this alien ... p'tend maybe he came from Atlantis or something...." Just don't p'tend it has anything to do with real moviemaking. --Richard T. Jameson

DVD Description
From director Roland Emmerich (The Day After Tomorrow) comes 10,000 BC, a sweeping odyssey into a mythical age of prophesies and gods, when spirits ruled the land and mighty mammoths shook the earth.

In a remote mountain tribe, the young hunter D'Leh (Steven Strait, The Convenant) has found his heart's passion - the beautiful Evolet (Camilla Bell, When A Stranger Calls). But when a band of mysterious warlords raid his village and kidnap Evolet, D'Leh must lead a small group of hunters to the end of the world in order to rescue her. As they venture into unknown lands, the group discovers there are civilisations beyond their own and that mankind's reach is far greater then they ever knew. With each new encounter D'Leh starts to build his small group into an army. Driven by destiny, the unlikely warriors must battle prehistoric predators whilst braving the harshest elements.

Stills from 10,000 BC

Synopsis
Director Roland Emmerich might have set this action epic in prehistoric times, but audiences can expect plenty of high tech special effects in this film from the man that brought INDEPENDENCE DAY and THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW to the screen.

Customer Reviews

So it's not accurate....so what?
It's best to view this movie with the proper expectations. It certainly wasn't designed to be a realistic or historically accurate portrayal of the times, but better serves as a tale of human struggle by a fictional tribe while on a journey with other tribes to recapture their people who were taken as slaves by a more advanced civilization.

Yes there are many inconsistencies with this film as it relates to time, place, and languages spoken. However, it had great cinematography, special effects, and action sequences. The story won't win an Oscar but it was better than some of the offerings at the cinema at the moment. The acting was fairly good and although some of the dialogue was very clichéd and the characters made some weird and dumb decisions (like freeing a saber tooth tiger, and hoping it doesn't eat you afterwards), overall it was a fun action movie that the kids would enjoy. But if a science teacher tells you to write a report about life 10,000 years ago I wouldn't base the paper on what this movie says. Wooly Mammoths working in the desert to create the pyramids?!?!? Maybe not.

Prehistoric fantasy film, ideal for kids. Unfairly panned, perhaps?
10,000 BC certainly isn't one of the year's stand-out films, but it does seem to have attracted an unfair amount of criticism. We enjoyed the mix of woolly mammoths, sabre-tooth tigers, murderous slavers and giant pyramids. It's thoroughly unoriginal, and some of the CGI is a bit wonky (can no one animate a big cat with any real success? The lions in I Am Legend were pretty cartoony, too), but it's not as big a stinker as many critics would have you believe.
The opening sequences are a bit of a giveaway; the action centres of two tribal children, and fast-forwards from their young romance to their coming-of-age ceremony. OK, so this is a kid's movie really (much as Jumper turned out to be); an adventure-quest set in a time of spear-chucking hunters and giant, killer, sabre-toothed ostriches. Yes: mayhem inducing ostriches. What's not to love about killer emus...?
Viewed as family entertainment (no gore, straightforward moral messages about staying loyal to your loved ones, making allies across tribal boundaries, and so on), 10,000 BC makes plenty of sense if you're happy to suspend your snobbery along with your disbelief for 90 minutes. Unlike a couple of other well-hyped recent films (Cloverfield springs to mind), I wasn't actually bored during 10,000 BC -- and it was impossible not to let out a wee 'YAY!' when the enslaved mammoths got their rampaging revenge on their captors.
It even has a happy ending. So if you want some frivilous, un-stressful family entertainment, then 10,000 BC delivers. It's not clever, or subtle, or even particularly well produced. But it was fun.

On a small screen, you will run into the usual problems with CGI-heavy films; that the glitches which get masked on a cinema screen tend to show up on a TV at home. So if you have hi-def then go for the Blu-Ray version for better visuals. And if you can plug in surround sound then it'll help because Omar Shariff mumbles his way through the narration (doh! Why have someone that famous do the voice-over if you can't hear them?).

Mostly harmless. Keep clear if you want your cinema to be clever, but sit back enjoy if you're a fan of big, dumb movies.
7/10

Not that bad!
I have to be honest, I was really dreading this film after some of the reviews I have read. My opinion is that OK, this film had a fairly flimsy story with no real depth, but as a fantasy adventure film it did an OK job. Granted it will never be a classic, but the effects were quite good, fairytale story... little people v big bad guys..... so all in all, probably never watch it again, but it was a alright Sunday afternoon no brainer of a movie.