The characters in 10,000 B.C. sport bad wigs and too much mud on their faces.

Those are some of the highlights of this atrocious snorefest about early man from Roland Emmerich, who also directed the disaster movies The Day After Tomorrow and Independence Day.

10,000 B.C. is a true disaster on every level, a derivative and sometimes incomprehensible mess about a primitive guy saving his tribe through love.

Didn't Jesus already do a version of this?

The movie begins with a long, complicated voice-over (Omar Sharif is the narrator) about spirits and nature and elders and prophecy and hunting and blah, blah, blah that goes on forever and has no bearing on what comes next, except to make the dull proceedings seem somehow more confusing.

What eventually shakes out is the arrival of a blue-eyed child, Evolet, whose appearance in those parts signifies the coming of turmoil but also good things.

Or something.

Anyway, the child grows up to be Camilla Belle, and she and Steven Strait, here playing a hunter named D'Leh, are an item. Together, they will save their people.

Didn't Raquel Welch already do a version of this?

The local hunters are dismayed when Goth-like villains show up on horseback to kidnap men and women and take them away.

The ones who didn't get kidnapped go after their stolen tribespeople. Evolet is one of the missing, and D'Leh vows to find her.

A handful of brave hunters begin a lengthy journey over the mountains to find those they love.

Along the way, they encounter various groups of other primitive people, all of whom wear ripped-and-layered clothing. Very retro homeless, we must say.

Didn't Mary-Kate Olsen already wear a version of this?

After the good guys walk over mountains and through deserts, they encounter their fellow tribespeople in some pseudo-Egyptian country where they have been enslaved, along with some woolly mammoths, for the construction of pyramids.

Didn't Dumbo already do a version of this?

Anyway, after plenty of aimless wandering and walking, some spear tossing at the enemy and all with voice-over narration and just the sort of overbearing, fake-mystical pan flute music that could inspire some viewers to rip up theatre carpet with their teeth and stuff it in their ears in desperation, the fabulous love story comes to an end.

And didn't Rae Dawn Chong do a version of this?

About the special effects: Two young people leaving the screening of 10,000 B.C. that we attended compared the appearance of the sabre-toothed tiger to, "A dumb house cat."

The clunky, woefully fakeout tiger, the woolly mammoths and some large, vicious Moa-like flightless birds are trotted out briefly in the film, but if you've seen the trailer for 10,000 B.C., you've already seen most of the effects.

There's just too much walking and talking in this movie and not enough big, scary animals.

As for the willing suspension of disbelief, D'Leh has a moment at the bottom of a trap with a enraged sabre-tooth, and then the cat sniffs him fondly a few scenes later.

Remember the stoner scenes with the wildcat in Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle? Of course you do.

(This film is rated PG)

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