The gorgeous and nubile Evolet (Camilla Belle), with brows of sable and limbs of Gold's Gym, has been living with her adoptive family, happily whiling away the days: falling in love with a boy named D'Leh (Steven Strait), cooking, weaving, watching the men and boys hunt mammoths and so on. She's a cheerful girl, though torn between her love and her duty to marry as assigned by the Old Mother (Mona Hammond).

One rare cloudy day, a pack of wicked warlords raid the quiet village and kidnap Evolet to be their PG-rated sex slave. Looking just like a chiseled Brad Pitt in black dreadlocks and carefully concealing animal skins, the fearless and stalwart D'Leh decides to pursue the "four-legged demons" (men on horseback) and rescue his one true love from a fate worse than death. Along the way, following Evolet's breadcrumb trail of pebbles and gems, he encounters wild and wooly mammoths, furious feathered foes and even a snarling saber-toothed tiger, who later becomes his ally.

As the story unfolds, we learn that D'Leh's dad abandoned him at a young age, leaving him feeling uncertain about the future and unsure of himself. Actually far from fearless, D'Leh undertakes this journey to prove his worth. At his side is reassuring father figure Tic'Tic (Cliff Curtis) and some of his friends. Joining the fray along the way are a band of sinewy African warriors who show D'Leh and his comrades the wonders of the pyramids and teach them the importance of camaraderie.

A sometimes fun adventure

Emmerich's previous big-screen blockbusters have included some hits (Independence Day, The Patriot) and misses (Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow); I suspect 10,000 B.C. will fall somewhere in the fair-to-middling area both among comparable films and in the director's ouvré.

It's a sometimes fun adventure with several undeniably magnificent set pieces. However, unlike prehistory sagas along the lines of Clan of the Cave Bear, Quest For Fire and Apocalypto, 10,000 B.C. does not have the gravitas needed to bring it to their status. Nor does it celebrate its inherent cheesiness, a la Conan The Barbarian, The Beastmaster (pet tiger and all) and The 13th Warrior. Like Beowulf before it, 10,000 B.C. struggles to perform an uneasy balancing act among drama, artistic license and supernatural mumbo-jumbo that it cannot quite manage to maintain.

The cast speak with faintly British accents and perfect diction. No doubt this is the accepted norm for period pieces, but it feels just slightly off base in this case. The music is aggressive and manipulative, and the narration—soothing as Sharif's intonations are—is ultimately patronizing. Between the reading and the music notes, we do have some acting out of the story. While Strait and Belle are decent bordering on innocuous, Curtis and Hammond are far too intense. Curtis has that tendency anyway (though he was excellently cast in Danny Boyle's Sunshine recently, which made the most of his seething and blustering), but wild card Hammond is just too hilarious with her many wide-eyed, gasping "waking from a prophetic dream" reaction shots.

While mostly impressive and amazing to see, the computer-generated lands and beasties are uneven. The shaggy elephants and raging rivers are suitably impressive, but the Etch-a-Sketch sands and origami-flimsy tiger are not. The tiger looks pretty good in its first scene—when D'Leh rescues it from drowning and thereby cements their friendship—but when it leaves the water and gets on solid ground, it appears to have all the depth and bulk of a paper lion, crumpling its big moment of glory towards the end.

10,000 B.C. should appeal to its target teen audience. These moviegoers may indeed be intrigued by the romantic themes and are probably hankering to see their onscreen role models doing something other than being mean girls in high school or running from black-haired ghosts in abandoned hospitals. On that level, 10,000 B.C. works, just barely. Clearly the film's heart is in the right place, but its script is not evolved enough to deliver the message without the constant clout of a caveman's club.