Expected more

An action-packed slog

It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

Quest for Fire (1981), or La guerre du feu, is a French film depicting primitive man's struggle to attain fire in Middle Paleolithic Europe. This movie fascinated me as a kid, but I haven't seen it for nearly two decades. I recently decided to watch it again, to see if adulthood would ruin the magic. After 35 years, it still holds up as a cinematic achievement. Written by Gérard Brach, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, and based on a Belgian novel of the same name by J.H. Rosny, it stars Everett McGill, Ron Perlman, Nicholas Kadi, and Rae Dawn Chong. This was Ron Perlman's first film. Jean-Jacques Annaud also directed The Name of the Rose (1986), Seven Years in Tibet (1997), and Enemy at the Gates (2001).Quest for Fire follows four Paleolithic humans as they search for a source of fire, the only thing that provides warmth, light, and security in a hostile world. As the film opens, the Wagabu, a savage tribe of ape-like Neanderthals, attacks a tribe of Homo sapiens, the Ulam, as they lounge in their cave. After a fierce battle, the Ulam scatter and find themselves in a marsh, where their pilot light (for lack of a better term) is extinguished. The tribal elder sends three men, Naoh (Everett McGill), Amoukar (Ron Perlman), and Gaw (Nicholas Kadi), to find a new source of fire, since they cannot create it themselves.Along the way, Naoh, Amoukar, and Gaw rescue Ika (Rae Dawn Chong) from a tribe of red-haired cannibals, the Kzamm. Ika belongs to the Ivaka, an advanced tribe of Homo sapiens. The Ivaka have mastered building shelter, using gourds as cups and bowls, atlatl, and most importantly, the ability to make fire with a hand drill. Together, the four return fire to the Ulam, but not before defeating a rival faction using their newly acquired, advanced weaponry.After all these years, Quest for Fire holds up so well partially because there were no special effects. Most scenes were shot in a single take, and the dialog consists of grunts, gestures, and a primitive language created by novelist Anthony Burgess. All the animals are played by actual animals, even the mammoths. The mammoths, I admit, look goofy, but I was surprised to learn the filmmakers used circus elephants to portray them. Like The Revenant (2015), Quest for Fire features a bear attack, but unlike The Revenant, the bear in Quest for Fire is 100 percent real, not CGI. There's something unnerving about watching actual lions prowl beneath a flimsy tree, waiting for the three helpless cavemen to fall, as opposed to fake, CGI monstrosities.Quest for Fire was filmed in Canada, Scotland, Iceland, and Kenya. The wilderness settings are both desolate and breathtaking. The main characters range over rocky caves, swamps, forests, marshes, and vast plains, battling the elements, starvation, wild animals, quicksand, and other Paleolithic humans. The conditions were so harsh, Ron Perlman and Everett McGill suffered frostbite, and the set designer contracted anthrax.The transition from animal to human is a theme running through the movie. As a more primitive tribe, Ulam males mount their females from behind. Noah does this with Ivaka at first, but later she teaches him the missionary position, symbolic of a more emotional, more human coupling. As the film closes, we see Noah lovingly cradling a pregnant Ivaka, showing humanity's future. In contrast, the apish Wagabu are a positively nightmarish glimpse at humanity's distant past. Screaming, savage, using sharpened animal bones as weapons, they personify the base survival instinct.I've read the DVD actually contains subtitles translating the primitive language in the film. When Quest for Fire was originally released in theaters, it didn't have subtitles, and I think the filmmakers intended us to watch it that way. There's something universal about the interaction between the characters, and subtitles just distract from that. What the characters say doesn't really matter–it's how they say it, the emotions they convey. Imagine trying to communicate with someone from an alien culture you've never encountered before. How would you work together to survive? That's part of the experience of the film.It's hard to judge the accuracy of a movie like this, in a genre that's so typically outlandish. So, technically, saber-tooth cats lived in North America and not Europe. At least there are no mammoths helping to build the pyramids or dinosaurs running around. The Clan of the Cave Bear (1986) is the only other movie to come close to trying to accurately portray prehistoric humanity, and its acting, costumes, and settings are almost laughable in comparison. Quest for Fire stands on its own as the most realistic portrayal of the Paleolithic Age ever recorded on film.

Since no one I know was around 80 millennia ago, it is up to the Director and Producers to set this film's stage in any way they choose. Our heroes demonstrate pretty basic human traits but there is a marked difference between them. The foreign "girl" adds wonder/advancement to many aspects of their adventurous dealings, from medicine, empathy, strategy, humour, sex, to the ultimate technological advance. The characters are believable, have depth and are thoroughly engaging (I know someone who is exactly like the Ron Pearlman character). If you have studied basic Anthropology (read Desmond Morris and Robert Ardrey), you might really enjoy this picture - there is a lot of very carefully designed 'script' material here. I enjoyed it back in the 80s when it came out and even more in 2016. It is clear there was huge effort put into the production (3 years preparation before filming). It is wonderful.

Stanley Kubrick's classic "2001" celebrates the first weapon, when a hairy primate through some burst of savage genius turns a useless thigh-bone into a dominating club. He thereby takes a giant first step in humanity's long pursuit of bigger and better weapons. On the other hand, "Quest for Fire" dramatizes humanity's other side: the civilizing arrival of the campfire. But not just any campfire; instead it's the security found in mastering the technique to make fire any time the tribe wants. As a result, the Cro-Magnons have for the first time some control over their environment and can take time to relax. That's made apparent at film's end when the clan gathers happily around crackling embers to relate stories through crude gestures and grunts. Perhaps the evolution of complex linguistic forms had its origins in just such relaxed moments, when imagination and thinking could take hold and get expression in the company of others.There's also that overlooked moment when Naoh humbly approaches the lordly herd of marauding mastodons. Tufts of grass in hand, he bows his head in an unmistakable gesture of submission, to which the herd responds-- not very plausibly --by chasing away the attacking cannibal clan. The point here is that Naoh understands in that quiet moment that we must live humbly with those forces much greater than ourselves if we want to survive-- a possible seed of what would later become religious belief, whether in the forces of nature or in the supposed power of the supernatural.Of course, this is all speculation. The filmmakers don't exactly hit you over the head with their messages. However, the point is that the film succeeds admirably in getting you to think about the natural history of what these lowly but momentous origins must have been like. Moreover, there are other suggestive moments, such as when the camera transitions from Rae Dawn Chong's pregnant belly to the distant full moon and humanity's far-off future. Some reviewers point out scientific flaws in the script and reject the film on that basis. But that misses the point. Of course the film is not a documentary, so no serious researcher would base a study on it. Nonetheless, the movie remains just that, a well-staged and provocative ninety minutes of unusual filmmaking. I've seen nothing like it before or since.

OK, well, even attempting to make this into a movie was innovative, especially at that time. I read the novel that this was based on, many years ago, and liked it a lot. To the best of my recollection, Ika and her tribe never appeared in it, so the filmmakers added that bit. The cinematography was beautiful, and the Scottish locations helped get across the cold of Ice Age Europe. The struggle to survive really came across as well. The special animal effects, were much remarked on at the time, but look rather cheesy now. However, I kind of like that. You really had to work at it back in the day, unlike now, when the computer will put anything at all onto your film. Ron Perlman looked seriously simian, and you have to give him credit, since he doesn't look that way normally. And this was the breakout role for Rae Dawn Chong, who also nailed her very odd role. Worth checking out.