I suppose it’s entirely appropriate that a film about an uphill battle will be facing a distinct uphill battle against the negative reviews that will undoubtedly abound.

Let me first tell you about the uphill battle featured in 10,000 B.C.’s story.

The scenario is one that’s pretty familiar, and one that we saw not all that long ago in Apocalypto: a primitive society is on the verge of major change, and is being encroached upon by violent, aggressive neighbors. In this case, the primitive society is made up of mammoth hunters; and given that we all know what happened to the mammoths, the fate of the hunters is pretty much a given, too.

But it’s not enough that they must lose their livelihood; they must be enslaved, too. Enter the “Four-legged Demons,” villains that are pretty familiar, villains that we saw not at all that long ago in Pathfinder: a foreign race of men who speak in a guttural tongue, wear outlandish WWF-style gear when they go on raiding parties, and take slaves with them to help sustain their society.

The hero of the story is also pretty familiar, of the type that we know from Scripture and that we’ve seen not so long ago in The Matrix: D’leh, the prophesied savior, the promised bearer of the White Spear, “the One.” When his gal pal gets hauled off by the Demons, he starts a long trek not unlike the one we saw a while back in Quest For Fire. Along the way, he has an Androcles-like encounter with a saber-toothed tiger, establishes his oeuvre as messiah, and then faces the biggest challenge of the journey: a staggering trek to lead an army across a desert waste that has “never been crossed before”—sort of like the assault on Acqaba in Lawrence of Arabia.

The film then climaxes with a Moses-like D’leh delivering an inspirational Declaration-of-Independence-style speech before leading a slave revolt against a Stargate-like Egyptian-ish god-man.

It’s all sort of reminiscent of Spartacus, isn’t it?

So now about the uphill critical battle… You can guess where I’m going, can’t you?

10,000 B.C. is entertaining enough in its off-season, modest-blockbuster-wanna-be sort of way. That is, as long as you’re not expecting Oscars-like, obtusely irrelevant drama or summertime first-rate spectacle, you’re not going to be too sorry you spent your ten bucks on this instead of, say, Fool’s Gold. The CGI might even inspire some oohs and aahs; and who could possibly ignore a film with both Return of the King-ish battle mammoths and Jurassic Park-ish dino-raptors?

But epic stories are pretty tough to sell in less than 110 minutes, even when they’re as stripped-down as Apocalypto was, and it’s tough to generate much tension about a days-long, life-threatening desert journey that plays out onscreen in under ninety seconds. Wow, bet that was a tough slog, eh? They hardly had time to work up a sweat.

It also doesn’t help that there are no big-name stars to distract us with personality magnetism, that the script insists on trotting out the blue-eyed-stranger-girl cliché, and that the principal villains seem designed to remind us of either Alec Guinness’s Fagin, the Shroud of Turin’s Jesus, or Osama Bin Laden—or all three. It’s generically anti-Semitic, after a visual fashion. Mel Gibson would be proud, I guess.

But the real problem here, as I’ve had the opportunity to suggest in nearly every paragraph above, is the film’s complete lack of originality. Sure, every “new” recipe merely amounts to recombining familiar ingredients. But caille en sarcophage still doesn’t taste quite like anything else, does it? 10,000 B.C. simply can’t make that kind of claim.

Fortunately, it really doesn’t try to. And there are some really fine bits of dialogue buried under the barrage of “homages,” such as when D’leh’s mentor tells him that some men “draw a larger circle,” one that protects “many many more” folks than just family and friends. Any film is nice, too, that talks about how you can’t be heroic when your claim to fame is a lie.

So this is a film that critics will probably hate, and audiences will probably like well enough if not love. Still, if you’re like me, you’ll probably be wincing by the time that D’leh gets his chance to pay homage to Buddy the Elf.

10,000 B.C. is rated PG-13 for “sequences of intense action and violence.” This is much milder fare than the Lord of the Rings movies, I’d say. Kind of Apocalypto-lite. Judge accordingly.

Courtesy of a local publicist, Greg attended a promotional screening of 10,000 B.C.