His films — Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow and Godzilla — may not have qualified as brilliant cinema, but director Ronald Emmerich had at least ensured that all of these box office money-spinners provided enough edge-of-the-seat thrills and spills to carve a new genre in Hollywood. But the doomsday drama formula seems to have finally run out of doom. 10,000 BC falls short not only in terms of excitement, it also has no real plot to fall back on.

Set during times when men co-habited with mammoths, worshipped living men as gods and blindly followed prophecy, 10,000 BC focuses on a remote mountain tribe where a young hunter D’Leh (Steven Strait) falls in love with the beautiful Evolet (Camilla Belle). When Evolet and some members of the tribe are kidnapped by a band of warlords, D’Leh takes it upon himself to rescue his lady-love.

Leading a small group of fellow hunters, D’Leh travels to the end of the world to save his people and, in the process, uncovers a new civilisation where men and mammoths alike are brutally enslaved. At the end of two (tedious) hours, D’Leh not only manages to win back his woman, he also emerges as a saviour in whose hands lies the destiny of the entire human race. Or something like that.

The biggest problem — apart from a wafer-thin storyline, of course — that plagues 10,000 BC is that it offers nothing new beyond its predecessors such as Apocalypto and 300. The thanda love-story between D’Leh and Evolet also fails to evoke any real interest and, while the mammoth-hunting scene in the early reels of the film makes one sit up in one’s seat, D’Leh’s encounter with one prehistoric predator after another does get irksome after a while.

More often than not, the dialogue too goes against the grain of the film. In fact, some of the lines the actors mouth come out sounding so downright goofy that they elicit guffaws from the audience where they are most certainly not intended. The lack of star value does nothing to redeem the situation.

What saves 10,000 BC from being a completely futile exercise is the brilliant cinematography and breathtaking special effects — this much at least you can still expect from a Ronald Emmerich film.

Watch 10,000 BC only if you have nothing better to do. In fact, catching a re-run of Independence Day on TV is still a superior option.