There’s something nerdy and historical about that title, 10,000 B.C. I was already dreaming of Roland Emerich (ID4, The Day After Tomorrow) sitting down with anthropologists to best both Jean Jacques Annaud’s Quest for Fire and that seminal scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 when hominids discover the use of tools (a bone goes flying up into the air and—fast forward 200,000 years—fades into a spaceship). I was way off the mark. 10,000 B.C. doesn’t give a crap about 10,000 B.C. (the date). It is set in some kind of alternative distant past where Pathfinder and The Ten Commandments coexist (and eventually collide, that’s the plot) within a few days walk of each other.

Speaking of plot, here are some highlights, in no particular order (since it doesn’t matter): The hot scantily dressed hero (Steven Strait, too bad) talks to a giant saber-toothed tiger. He escapes giant pissed-off ostriches. He tries to get his hands on the one person in the movie who has blue eyes (Camilla Belle), but this other guy dressed like Sinbad the Sailor always outsmarts him. He (being white, therefore a natural leader, and really really horny for the blue-eyed girl) leads a zillion black men against a bunch of mystical middle-Easterners who like to wear dresses and makeup.

And yet, 10,000 B.C. leaves you so stunned at the new heights of nonsense it reaches at every passing scene that it is never entirely boring. You keep waiting for Roman centurions to ride in on dinosaurs, or for the next impossible prophecy, “Oh my, he is wearing an ochre one-shoulder wife-beater. He must be The One.” At one point, Cliff Curtis, playing Tic’Tic with a mask of perpetual boredom and irritation at being in such a lame movie, even blurts out, “A prophecy has many faces, many ways of coming true.” In other words: Don’t get hung up on details; sit back, switch off your brain and enjoy the CG.