Mini-Review: As if we really need the bad summer movie season to start two months earlier, Roland Emmerich has outdone himself in his attempts to be Mel Gibson with this movie that's a cross between "Braveheart" and "Apocalypto" with a "Titanic"-level love story thrown in for good measure. Despite stealing liberally from movies as diverse as "Pathfinder", "300" and "Troy" (okay, maybe not so diverse), the film offers surprisingly little excitement as Emmerich and his co-writer, executive producer and composer, Harald Klosser, spend more effort on the film's visuals and sweeping score than coming up with a coherent story, let alone bothering to do any historical research into the times. Artistic license doesn't even touch upon the fact that this reality has mammoths living in the same time as ships and modern navigation in a world where snowy mountain peaks, deserts and rivers are all within walking range of each other... and of course, English is the universal language in this fictitious fantasy world that might as well be one of Emmerich's "Stargate" dimensions. Granted, most people won't be watching this movie for any sort of realism, but even the larger-than-life CG-enhanced action set pieces are few and far between with a long gap after the cool mammoth hunt before we see more of this land's creatures--the CG wooly mammoths are even more impressive in comparison to the giant killer turkeys that come later. When we finally get a sabretooth tiger (who we'll call Tony due to his resemblance to the cereal spokesman), it's for a ridiculous plot device in which Steven Strait's D'Leh saves it and has the favor returned later, and that's that. For what's essentially an action-effects flick, the plot is needlessly complicated, made sillier with a lot of talking heads and exposition in "caveman-speak," most of it so MST3K bad that you wonder if Emmerich is just asking to be mocked in the next spoof movie. Strait isn't terrible as the film's lead but otherwise, the acting is dismal and embarrassing across the board, and even the incessant voice-over narrative by the legendary Omar Sharrif quickly gets tedious. In terms of quality, Emmerich's latest is the cinematic equivalent of the television series "Cavemen" but at least the Geico commercials make an effort to get the historical accuracy right, and going swimming at the beach in March would probably be more desirable than enduring this premature summer dud. An atrocious waste of a perfectly good CGI budget. Rating: 3/10