A drinking game based around the historical inaccuracies in 10,000 B.C. — a film that posits the pyramids were built with the help of woolly mammoths — would cause brain death before the end of the first reel. And it would thus be redundant, because Roland Emmerich’s pre-Biblical epic doesn’t need any help killing little grey cells. This year's first Event Movie is almost guaranteed to wind up as its dumbest.

Not to mention its blandest: 10,000 B.C.’s PG rating precludes carnage or carnality. The story is meant to hinge on the love between an earnest young mammoth hunter (Steven Strait) and the foxy blue-eyed foundling touched by prophecy (Camilla Belle), but their yearning seems utterly chaste. Certainly there’s not enough chemistry to justify mammoth-boy’s epic quest to steal his beloved back from a marauding tribe based in the “mountains of the Gods,” which turns out to look a lot like the pseudo-Egyptian sets from Stargate.

But before we get there, mammoth-boy and his ragtag band, comprised of other people dishonored by the marauders (each tribe has its own costume motif, like in The Warriors) have to face all manner of peril. Some of it comes from within (conquering fear and all that), but most of it has to do with monsters. These include some carnivorous ostrich-lizards and a saber-tooth tiger with the unintentionally Surrealist tendency to change size from scene to scene (shades, actually, of Emmerich’s Godzilla, which had similar problems with scale).