In 10,000 B.C., Roland Emmerich imagines the prehistoric world as a moderately perilous melting pot in which different physical characteristics, languages, and customs -- plus dwelling in vastly different climatic zones -- cannot divide mankind. Forget about club-wielding cave men and gargantuan creatures chasing Raquel Welch. Don't expect an abundance of gripping action or a scintilla of campy fun either. This feels more like a serious-minded, computer-enhanced Bible epic.

For all the movie's multiculturalism, the Egyptian government or anyone concerned with Egypt's image could take exception to the villainy attributed to their ancestors. While it's not much worse than the average Hollywood portrait -- about two notches below the Persians in 300 -- they'd have a point since the movie paints a picture of Stone Age humanism that their civilization defiles.

What, you might ask, does Egypt have to do with 10,000 B.C.? Well, without giving away crucial plot points, there are times when the movie feels like a story about swarthy barbarians oppressing heroic peoples, seedlings of the Judeo-Christian tradition or peaceful Africans, many of whom utter monosyllabic dialogue with British accents.

Emmerich, whose past projects include Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, has created his own take on Disney's "It's A Small World" -- and you've no idea how small he depicts the world as being back then. So you can't blame Egyptians or, extrapolating further, defenders of Islam, to be displeased about being left out of the fold. Any movie that allows for such an broad interpretation must be a thematic jumble and 10,000 B.C. evokes too wide a range of antecedents, including Spartacus, Jurassic Park, The Mummy, Cleopatra, Apocalypto, and even Dances with Wolves. Rather than a he-man in the Kirk Douglas, Victor Mature, or (shudder) Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson mold, we have the less-than-dynamic, dreadlocked Steven Strait playing the chosen one D'Leh, a young hunter of the Yagahl tribe that inhabits forbiddingly cold, high-mountain terrain.

The script, co-written by Emmerich and Harald Kloser, is as fuzzy as the wooly mammoths the Yagahls, who most closely resemble Native Americans, rely upon. It's also about as scary as those creatures are ferocious, which is to say not much at all. Whoever cut the trailer did an excellent job of making 10,000 B.C. seem like a wildly visceral, exotic adventure. While there are moments, it never makes you jump. On the plus side, the movie isn't as lumbering as the digital elephantine beasts. I was never bored, but the experience is firmly rooted in our world and turns on your appetite for enduring an anachronistic tale about identity, freedom and romantic destiny.

When D'Leh's beloved, Evolet -- a mysterious blue-eyed girl connected to a prophecy and played by Camilla Belle (often a dead ringer for Elizabeth Taylor) -- is kidnapped along with other Yagahls by invaders on horseback, D'Leh and an elder (Cliff Curtis) give chase. They pass through a rain forest where they're menaced by giant ostrich -- my favorite part. Later, D'Leh has a brief encounter with a saber tooth tiger that gives him credibility with a race he meets on the African savannah. Eventually, as much by accident as cosmic design, he discovers where Evolet, his fellow Yagahl and thousands of others from various ethnic backgrounds have been taken to work as slaves. He leads a rebellion -- a savior with matted hair and a cruciform white spear crying freedom in an unassuming voice.

If Emmerich served up more ostrich and fewer Egyptian stereotypes, priestly eunuchs included, 10,000 B.C. would be more memorable. He projects Enlightenment humanism back before it was a glimmer in a white European man's eye. It does make you appreciate the violent approach Mel Gibson took to a very similar story in Apocalypto. Anthropologists can weigh in on the relative plausibility of the scenarios and whether tolerance was a luxury human beings could afford in either setting or period. To get charged up in our epoch, moviegoers need something more primitive and unfamiliar than what's on offer in 10,000 B.C.

(Released by and rated "PG-13" for intense sequences of action and violence.)