The joke about this film was always that, historically, humans meeting dinosaurs and Raquel Welch’s salon-perfect hairdo are both naively inaccurate. Which kind of misses the point. This is a fantasy romp. Forget meeting dinosaurs and perfect hair – with the passing of time and the benefit of hindsight, we can look back at One Million Years B.C. and see pretty clearly that the film gets absolutely nothing right at all. But it is an interesting time capsule of how the popular public opinion of the 60s perceived prehistory, stone age humanity, and dinosaurs.
It’s probably best enjoyed today as an adventure movie the whole family can enjoy on a lazy Saturday afternoon; one that’s set in no particular time or place, an almost wordless extended episode of classic Star Trek (one that doesn’t feature any of the regular cast, of course), and another welcome chance to experience the awesome stop-motion genius of Ray Harryhausen’s special creature effects. So that’s two more reasons than you have to watch the equally flawed (but nowhere near as good) 10,000 BC.
