Director Roland Emmerich (Independence Day,The Day After Tomorrow), co-typing with Harald Kloser, rips off Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings and a handful of otherwise forgotten B-movie spectacles to recount the early adventures of young mankind. In particular, this is the tale of how an organized, insurgent stampede of woolly mammoths forever altered the construction of Giza’s Great Pyramid. Or something. Oh, but don’t be fooled by the movie’s poster. The guy (Steven Strait) doesn’t battle the saber-tooth tiger; he befriends it. That makes him all right in one foreign tribe’s book (or, more accurately, in its prophecy), and thereby earns him some multiethnic cooperation with the destiny-quest to a) rescue his beloved blue-eyed cave babe (Camilla Belle) from slave traders and b) secure the future of his people. Of all people. Well, it is cat-positive, and occasionally thrilling, but also primitively stupid.
