It is the Stone Age and a meteor comes down in sight of a band of cavemen. The meteor smashes a dueling T-Rex and triceratops, placing this in a highly-fictionalized version of the Stone Age. Clearly, this is a call back to One Million Years B.C., especially since the dinosaurs are credited as Ray and Harry (Ray Harryhausen). The cavemen recover the meteor at the bottom of a huge crater and find it is hot. Hot potato! After tossing it around, they soon start to kick it back and forth. Moments later, football (American Soccer) is invented.
Generations later, cavemen still live in the crater that is now a lush valley home for a band of rabbit hunters. Hmm, call back to Curse of the Were-Rabbit? Dug (Eddie Redmayne) is an ambitious youth who hopes to convert the tribe to hunting woolly mammoths. Life is placid in the valley until Lord Nooth (Tom Hiddleston) arrives on his bronze-armored mammoths. He and his Bronze Age goons evict the cavemen from the valley. Through convoluted plotting and chance encounters, the cavemen are given the opportunity to reclaim their valley if they defeat the football champions of the Bronze Age city. They have two weeks to train.
Having recently read a book on the Bronze Age collapse, I was annoyed by much of this movie. Yes, it's for kids but ahistorical nonsense always grates. Toilet paper, coin money, domesticated woolly mammoths, books, and a giant mallard duck with shark-teeth all detracted from the setting. Mostly, this is a film for football fans, with in-jokes and football silliness. It is far beneath the genius of Wallace and Gromit. Even Chicken Run was more entertaining. The weakest Aardman Animation by far. Maybe football (Soccer) fans will enjoy it.
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