Directed by Roland Emmerich

In theatres

Rating: Bomb

The question is not how bad it is, but is it so bad that it is, at the very least, funny?

No chance.

The B.C. in the title should stand for "beyond cruelty" to any audience watching this terrible film from director Roland Emmerich.

There are two names that strike fear into my heart when I hear they are directing a film, the first and most obvious choice being Michael Bay, director of that master mess of a film Transformers (2007). The second, without question, is Emmerich who has given us such gems as Godzilla (1998) and The Day After Tomorrow (2002).

The man has no sense of narrative storytelling, no sense of pacing, shot selection, nothing! It is often as though a five-year-old child (and I am being more than fair) was given a camera and told to compose images without being told what images were.

Walking into this film, one is aware it is not going to be very good, reason one being the fact the studio was releasing the picture in the winter months after the New Year, the graveyard for new releases. Two, they were obviously hoping for a massive first weekend (which they got) before people started reading the reviews. In fairness to doing this article, I watched the film not at a press screening, but with an audience, and watched time and time again as paying customers left their seats and the theatre in utter disgust. As a critic, I am unable to do that. Though I wanted to.

So I sat through to the bitter end of this horrid mess.

When the lovely Evolet (Camilla Belle) is taken by nasty prehistoric men to their city, it is up to D'Leh (Steven Strait) to save the lass from this nasty people who seem to have taken lessons from the city folks in Mel Gibson's brilliant Apocalypto (2006).

In the hopes of proving his manhood against these vicious captors, he goes to war against the pyramid-building maniacs. Along the way he will encounter saber-toothed lions, woolly mammoths and assorted such digitally-created creatures that look digitally created. The beauty of the characters created via computer in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Lord of the Rings films, or King Kong (2005), was that not once did they ever look like such. Not so here, in fact the entire film resembles a video game. The visual effects are terrible, all looking like they are glossy with a sheen over them. The locations do not look lived in, nor even remotely prehistoric but rather like, again, the background of a game.

One of the worst films I have seen in over a decade. It is insulting to anyone watching it and the fact a director is able to get millions of dollars from a film studio to make this mess is simply insane. Why? Because terrible films make money . . . your money. How does that make you feel?

My deepest apologies to both Peter Jackson and Mel Gibson for mentioning their very fine films in the same review as this mess.