10,000 B.C.

If you took the square root of 300 and divided by 1,000,000 B.C. (the DeMille version natch) and add a touch of Apocalypto and a dose of Land of the Pharaohs and you have 10,000 B.C. This is a live action ice age epic that delivers convincing CGI effects while keeping the audience awake with a tale of tribal loyalty.
Instantly this film's effect work better than they did in the same director's last film, Day After Tomorrow. Roland Emmerich has a firm grasp on themes of wide general interest even while twisting them with science fiction. I actually prefer Stargate to the more popular ID4, and it's anybody's guess whether the 1998 Sony version of Godzilla is remembered at all. Global warming, construction of the pyramids, the year 2012 (Emmerich's next project) are all subjects that flow into the current zeitgeist. Specifically Emmerich mixed some spectacular imagery with a really bad script for Day After Tomorrow and that film's wolves running around Manhattan were as shiny fake as the CGI creatures in the recent Last Man on Earth (the one film I have mentioned here that Emmerich didn't direct). But in 10,000 B.C. when the wooly mammoths stampede it looks very cool and photorealistic. And when a saber tooth tiger gets rescued from a pit and climbs out it only looked fake for a second, as compared to the entire sequence. These are the things that occupy my life.
10,000 B.C. follows a tribe who live surrounded by mountaintops as they travel from their frosty lair through a verdant Africa and into the lush sands of Egypt. At stake is the very future of the tribe and thus mankind. Along the way many other tribes are revealed, most friendly. but some corrupt. The wide vistas offered for view also include shots of stars and even constellations that figure in the plot.
We should be hearing a lot more from the two leads, Steven Strait and Camilla Belle, the latter I couldn't quite place while watching her writhe under her captors cruel will. Belle was also in When a Stranger Calls and a small indie called The Quiet and Strait will appear later this month in Stop Loss. 10,000 B. C. arrives this Friday from Warner Bros., and before the film other WB trailers - Speed Racer, The Dark Knight, and Get Smart - unreeled. This is a line-up that would be very hard to fuck up.