Roland Emmerich does a fine line in cheerfully trashy, world-trashing epic films, such as Independence Day. Though his previous feature, 2004’s The Day After Tomorrow, did take him into more sombre territory with its eco catastrophe, it was still essentially an entertaining B-grade movie. He’s turned back the clocks for this, his first directorial excursion since The Day After Tomorrow. Turned it back to an era that seems to sit, chronologically, somewhere between the profoundly inaccurate, hugely enjoyable Hammer approach to prehistory of One Million Years BC, the 1966 film forever remembered for putting Raquel Welch in a rabbit-fur bikini, and the more sombre, anthropological (ish) Stone Age activities of Jean-Jacques Arnaud’s Quest for Fire, the 1981 film renowned for having its characters talk entirely in a language of grunts made up by Anthony Burgess.

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