10,000 B.C.

10,000 B.C. delivers what its title promises only loosely: a fast-moving, mythic adventure filled with animal attacks, battles, terrific sound, and impressive camerawork. It also promotes honesty, chastity, loyalty, courage, decency, and standing up for others. D’Leh’s refusal to live a lie gives the story one of its strongest moral moments.

But the film’s world does not hold together. Characters cross frozen mountains without proper clothing or shoes, cross the desert without apparent hardship, and somehow reach the end looking as fresh as when they began. The story’s Romantic worldview also presents noble savages as wiser and better than civilized people.

Because the film is entertaining but very silly, you can wait for home viewing rather than make it a family theater outing.

D’Leh lives with the Yagahl, a mountain tribe that survives by hunting mastodons. He loves Evolet, a blue-eyed girl connected to an old prophecy.

When slave traders capture members of the tribe, including Evolet, D’Leh joins a small rescue party. Their journey leads across mountains and desert, through attacks by dangerous creatures, and toward a pyramid where a vast slave labor force is being gathered.

Three stars means this is a moderately entertaining film with real strengths and obvious weaknesses. It moves briskly, and the sound and camerawork are terrific. Several animal attacks and battles provide genuine jump-out-of-your-seat moments.

The trouble is the neglected detail. The characters’ travel through frozen mountains and desert makes little sense, and the film’s thin storyline cannot support all its spectacle. Steven Strait does a good job as D’Leh, while Camilla Belle’s Evolet is somewhat superficial.

10,000 B.C. presents courage, honesty, chastity, loyalty, decency, justice, and putting values first as virtues. D’Leh confesses when he has lied, refuses to live by a lie, and fights to rescue his people. The film also portrays the pursuit of justice and standing up for others positively.

Its larger worldview is strongly Romantic and influenced by Rousseau’s idea of the noble savage. The tribal people are portrayed as wiser and better than the civilized people who enslave them, while animal spirits and an earth-mother figure shape the story’s spiritual atmosphere. The film also includes a UFO component, suggesting that the pyramid builder came from beyond the stars or from a lost civilization such as Atlantis.

The movie’s depiction of the slave traders, who wear turbans and resemble modern Muslims, creates an additional cultural incongruity. African tribes join D’Leh’s fight against them, while the prophecy still centers on a blue-eyed outsider as the great hope.

The film is right to reject lying, slavery, and injustice, but it is wrong to treat fallen humanity as noble by nature. Scripture teaches that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). In Christ, the divisions that structure this film’s world are overcome: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

10,000 B.C. has energetic action, impressive technical work, and worthwhile moral virtues. But its thin story, glaring implausibilities, and mixed worldview make it better suited to a home viewing than a family theater trip. Our answer is WAIT FOR HOME. For more substantial alternatives, see.