Director Roland Emmerich has spent half his career trying to obliterate Planet Earth and humankind with blockbusters such as Independence Day, Godzilla and The Day After Tomorrow, a film which imagined the return of the Ice Age.

Emmerich's brain must still be frozen - that's the only explanation for the dreadful dialogue, risible plotting and wafer-thin characterisation in 10,000 BC, a rollicking journey through the dawn of time, which stampedes historical and geographical accuracy under the hooves of a herd of belligerent woolly mammoths (or manuk, as they are called here).

Emmerich and co-writer Harald Kloser, who also composed the film's deafening score, fling a spear through subtlety with the opening lines of Omar Sharif's narration - "Only time can teach us what is truth and what is legend..." - revealing a discomfiting truth: everyone involved is taking this nonsense seriously.

Admittedly there are a couple of light comic interludes, but the vast majority of the laughs are unintentional, like a curious episode with a sabre-tooth tiger (known here as 'spear tooth'), which mirrors the fable of Androcles and the lion.

On the snowy peaks of a Siberian mountain range, the Yagahl tribe unites in the face of adversity, awaiting the arrival of a child with blue eyes, as decreed in ancient legend. Sure enough, such a whippersnapper arrives and blossoms into the beautiful, headstrong Evolet (Belle).

She falls in love with warrior D'Leh (Strait), a fretful young man with impressive pecs and a fine head of dreadlocks, and is then kidnapped by an evil warlord (Badra).

10,000 BC might be good entertainment if it treated each absurd detour with a knowing wink and a smile, but Emmerich and Kloser are far too absorbed in projecting this simple rites of passage story on to the widest possible canvas.

Thus, D'Leh and his brethren gallivant across ice-laden peaks, sweltering desert and lush, tropical forest, clashing with a flock of giant, carnivorous chicken. His accent is completely different to the vapid Belle, who spends most of the film squinting dust away from her contact lenses.

Production design is impressive, even if some of the computer effects work is unconvincing and the final showdown on the pyramids a huge anti-climax.

Strait's most outstanding feature is his chest, overshadowing what little work he does with his face to reflect his boy hero's exertions.

His accent is completely different to the vapid Belle, who spends most of the film squinting dust away from her contact lenses.

Badra is a promising diversion as the bad guy, who whips the heroine into submission by snarling, "I like your spirit but I will have to break it."

Ours is broken at roughly the same time and no amount of silly prophecies, human sacrifices or mammoth stampedes can revive it.

Action/Drama/Romance. Steven Strait, Camilla Belle, Cliff Curtis, Joel Virgil, Affif Ben Badra, Mo Zinal, Marco Khan, Nathanael Baring, Junior Oliphant, Mona Hammond