“I wanted to make a movie that would allow audiences to fall into this other world that looks and feels like nothing they have ever seen.” Roland Emmerich, a director of mammoth ambition - and woolly thinking.

You see, almost every set-up in 10,000 BC has been culled from some other epic, from the plots of Apocalypto and Conan the Barbarian and the spear-waving machismo of Troy and 300 to Jurassic Park’s beasties in the undergrowth and the stampeding dinosaurs of Peter Jackson’s King Kong.

After mumbling about the dawn of man and mammoth migration patterns, narrator Omar Sharif introduces us to the Yaguhl, a tribe of hunter-gatherers whose shared dreadlocks cannot disguise their remarkable racial differences.

Since childhood, handsome D’Leh (Steven Strait) has held a torch for blue-eyed beauty Evolet (Belle) who is destined for greatness – according to the tribe’s overly theatrical mystic Old Mother (Mona Hammond, who interestingly has the OBE for services to drama).

But even after single-handedly felling a mammoth and receiving the coveted White Spear, D’Leh only gets to prove his worth when Evolet is snatched by ‘four-legged demons’ – fearsome pillagers who need slaves to build their faraway pyramids.

Led by seasoned warrior Tic’Tic (Cliff Curtis), the rescue party makes like Frodo and co. to trek over snow-clad mountains, through steamy jungles and into the endless desert in the flick of a mastadon’s tail.

While covering this not-in-any-textbook continent, D’Lea battles giant killer dodos, befriends a sabre-toothed tiger, and gathers together all the other clans whose people have been enslaved.

Despite having a born leader in the multi-lingual Nakudu (Joel Virgil), whitey takes charge and the United Tribes of Benetton then get a bit lost before massing against the evil empire and its sacrifice-crazy priests.

Handily, D’Lea and the free men are able to infiltrate the citadel at will. They even find a blind wise man under the floorboards who tells them what must be done.

Even more impressively, the final battle switches from chaos to complete hush with little more than a raised arm and a “Hang on a minute, lads”.

Emmerich certainly knows how to deploy a CGI effect. The problem here is that he wastes most of our time on tedious mumbo-jumbo and very long walks.

Marco Khan and Affif Ben Badra enjoy themselves as the chief villains, but the leads prompt little human interest, with Strait being just that and Belle unlikely to usurp Raquel Welsh as cinema’s prehistoric pin-up.

With too much talk, not enough adventure and a laughable disregard for geography and anthropology, 10,000 BC is less Jurassic Park than Pleistocene parp.

Elliott Noble