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D'Leh has a tough life. He has bad hair, bad skin, resents his deadbeat dad and does stupid things to impress his friends. On top of that he wants plenty of recognition, affirmation and trophies for pretty much anything he does. And then, when things don't go his way, he goes and gets all passive aggressive.

Now you might think that D'Leh was a little known character on 'Beverley Hills 90210' or 'Dawson's Creek'. You'd be wrong. D'Leh comes from the Mesolithic era — a time where there were no schools, teachers or teenage dramas. In fact there were no domesticated horses or cultivated crops either — but don't let that bother you.

It certainly doesn't bother director Roland Emmerich ('Independence Day', 'Godzilla', 'Day After Tomorrow') who apparently didn't feel the need to learn a thing about the year 10 000 BC before he made a movie with that very name. He also decided it wasn’t necessary to know anything about natural history, evolution, pre-historic man, the pyramids, the Nile or basic ecology.

Actually, the only reason he could possibly have made this movie was because he'd seen Mel Gibson's 'Apocalypto' and thought it was boring… just as everybody else did. He'd improve it — by adding drama, intrigue, romance and an actual story — but wasn't sure where to fit in an alien invasion or an overblown car chase. So dinosaurs (65 million years after their extinction), a cheapo computer-generated saber-toothed tiger and a 'Lord Of The Rings'-inspired mammoth hunt would have to do the trick instead.

Maybe it sounded very impressive on paper. Translated onto celluloid, it isn't even remotely interesting. In fact it's pretentious, convoluted and insulting to anyone with an IQ higher than that of Tara Reid.

Basically, one day, while D'Leh is busy sulking about something or other, black riders attack his clan and capture most of the people including his lover Evolet. Feeling the need to prove himself and deal with his guilt over being so cowardly, he decides to chase after these riders and free his people: armed with a special white spear and a few companions, he travels into the great unknown.

D'Leh's journey takes him through every biome known to man, introduces him to every great tribe that ever lived (and quite likely some that didn't), and eventually ends in Egypt. Here the aforementioned black riders have been enslaving people in order to build the pyramids at Giza as a tribute to a tyrannical leader — an individual who inspires fear simply by sporting long nails and gold platform shoes.

And when you take away the mammoths that's really all there is to '10 000 BC'. If you think it all sounds a bit silly, you'd be right. And to top it all off, Emmerich's film isn't actually much more entertaining than 'Apocalypto'.