grew up loving dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures. I even had a treasured book completely devoted to Mammoths (The Book of Mammoths by Dr. Josef Augusta) that I still have with a bookmark at my favorite page of a mother and baby mammoth. So when I saw the first posters for 10,000 B.C. (opened March 7 throughout San Diego) featuring one of those big woolly beasts, I was delighted. Yes it had the potential to be cheesy (memories of One Million Years, B.C. and Caveman leapt to mind like alarm bells) but this new film also had the potential to create -- with state of the art technology -- a vivid portrait of prehistoric life. So I set my sights low as I waited for 10,000 B.C. All it had to deliver was my beloved woolly mammoths in all their splendor on the big screen. Well... apparently I didn't set my sights low enough.

Roland Emmerich, the man who brought us Independence Day, Godzilla and The Day After Tomorrow, is the one running the cinematic time machine to take us back to the Upper Paleolithic (or thereabouts) period. But what does he find there? Is it prehistoric man discovering agriculture or magnificent beasts that we've never laid eyes on? No. Emmerich travels back to 10,000 B.C. only to find the same time worn clichés that plague modern man. The press materials spin the tale as "a sweeping odyssey into a mythical age of prophesies and gods, when spirits rule the land and mighty mammoths shake the earth." Wow. I guess that sounds more impressive than lovesick prehistoric man traverses the globe to rescue the woman he loves. In fact, if you swap out the woman for a son, you pretty much have The Day After Tomorrow in which Dennis Quaid showed his fatherly devotion by walking up the east coast of the newly frozen U.S. in order to find his son. May be all the snow in that global warming disaster film inspired Emmerich to make an Ice Age movie.

But Emmerich's film has about as much to do with history as Apocalypto or The Other Boleyn Girl. But at least neither of those films jolted viewers by stepping so egregiously out of their historical time zones. In fact. I think the animated comedy Ice Age might be more accurate than Emmerich's film. Now I'm not saying that filmmakers can't play a little fast and loose with the facts in order to fashion a engaging narrative but Emmerich and co-writer Harald Kloser push credibility so far that it just snaps. Either that or I must have dozed off during my prehistoric history class because I just don't recall anything about woolly mammoths helping to build the pyramids or prehistoric man having a great dental plan (check out the pearly whites in the climatic final scenes). And I just never knew that you could walk right out of the Ice Age and into Ancient Egypt in a matter of days. But Emmerich's characters have no trouble pulling that miracle off. Heck, Emmerich should have just gone one step further and included Charelton Heston as Moses parting the Red Sea for Emmerich's prehistoric man.

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