10,000 B.C.

I will admit that I was a little afraid when I saw the trailers for 10,000 B.C. I had visions of The Scorpion King meets Quest for Fire. The trailers did look exciting, however, and I decided to take the chance. I should have gone to Foxwoods because this movie was excellent.

10,000 B.C. is the story of a young mammoth hunter who is in love with a blue-eyed girl that was taken in by his tribe when she was young. Her parents had apparently been killed by "four legged demons", and she escaped. She is the village favorite because of a prophecy from the wise woman, and he is the son of a former tribal leader, who apparently deserted the tribe when the boy was young. The tribe hunts woolly mammoths for survival, and they are mostly happy. Until the "four legged demons" raid the tribal camp.

The "demons" are slavers on horseback, and they take the blue-eyed girl and a lot of tribes people, fleeing over the snow-packed mountains. Our adventure begins when the young hero, who doubts that he is a hero, decides to lead a small band to track down the slavers and get their people back.

If you think that this movie is another Quest for Fire and that you might have to struggle through a whole movie of grunts of bad subtitles, you are mistaken. We understand the mammoth hunters, and when they encounter some tribes in northern Africa, a plot point allows us a translator.

If you think this movie will be some farce, like The Scorpion King (which I liked, but let's be real - it was a farce), with unreality and anachronisms staining the story, you are wrong. 10,000 B.C. is an adventure epic, and there are some wild things that happen, but nothing ever gets out of hand. And there are absolutely no foolish characters. You know the ones: they act not only as comedy relief, but speak in 21st Century slang to make us feel at home. I hate those characters. Those characters should be banned from movies. 10,000 B.C. does not have any of those characters.

There are cool scenes, great computer graphics, breathtaking panoramic shots, and a mix of cultures that gives us a taste of what history could have been like.

Kids movie? Older kids? Yes. Younger kids? No. There are some dramatic scenes and some scenes that younger movie fans might find scary. There are deaths, though not too much blood.

Date movie? Yes. A love story drives the film, and there is nothing that would be embarrassing.

I have only one problem with 10,000 B.C.: the saber-toothed tiger was not in the movie nearly enough. I actually felt gypped. He's in the trailers, he's on the movie poster (although not the one I chose above), and he was super cool, but he's only in two scenes! Gyp!

I loved this movie, and I give it six out of six woolly mammoths.