Quest for Fire

This movie is sooooo good.It seems like it could be a cheesy, silly dumb movie about dumb cavemen but by the end you're totally into it.Only wish I could have found a blu ray version. Still, the DVD is way better quality than the streaming versions I have seen online. To hell with streaming anyway.

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 the 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.

Cave man all the way.

Husband has watched it multiple times. Once was enough for me.

A classic movie that we have grown up watching. Absolutely marvelous movie without one spoken word in it. And you get a chance to see a lot of young stars in their early movies.

One of my all time favorite movies, saw it when it was released in theaters, but this was a rental not a purchase.

What can you say about this film? I watched it when it came out in 1981. Why? Rae Dawn Chong. Rewatching it 32 years later it’s both captivating, with really stunning cinematography, and also hilariously funny, in an unintentional way! Ron Perlman in one of his earliest, if not first, film performances, makes you care about this 80k year old—I’m assuming Neanderthal?—with no more than grunting and facial expressions! You’ll laugh! You’ll cry! You’ll probably wonder WHY!?

I suppose I should mench that I purchased the 2003 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment Letterbox version of this film and, yes, this review refers to "phylogene's" review so I repeat that I am NOT AN ANTHROPOLOGIST, but if I was one, I think I would realize that this project was a vehicle for trainees of Desmond Jones School of Mime and Physical Theater and that Paleolithic accuracy was taking a backseat to performance techniques, especially relying more on physical action than language, to relate the story. It is a story about homo sapiens relationship with other homonids through millienium compacted into a (roughly) hour-and-a-half time frame with the equivalent of a search for "The Holy Grail" theme, obviously fire being the grail in this case, to provide a "thread" for the action to move along. The quest moves our heroes from reliance on fire naturally created and primitive tools (and weapons) to the domestication of fire and advanced tools (and weapons). As for family and sex (refer to phylogene's review), it seemed their was a sense of family among the principle tribe to begin with; I guess the "evolution" was to a Christian-like couple approach reforming the "communal" tribe into a society of nuclear families. Oh, though it seems unlikely a Mastadon in a field of grass would be impressed by a mere handful of it (maybe a bale of clover or alfalfa hay), there are some pretty dangerous animals that are easily approachable, with the right approach. And, again, it was a dramatic representation of bravery and boldness, possibly daring and guile, overwhelming a superior adversary, or something like that.I thought the weakest part of this project was that our primary tribe meets the more advanced "Marsh People" and the MPs provide the advancements - I wanted to see (and, when this was originally released, thought it was about) an interpretation of how homosapiens developed language, advanced weaponry - I mean tools, and discovered how "rubbing 2 sticks together" could produce fire, oh, also the poor makeup done on the more primitive tribes and the "sabers" on the Sabertooth Tigers (a good laugh watching them fight their dental extensions like a person with a new set of ill-fitting dentures!). Foibles aside, this was a fairly ambitious and original project and I do enjoy it - it is one of my multi-watch DVDs.

Great that this classic movie is available on bluray. It is a very realistic interpretation of how life might have been when control of fire made the difference between life and death for a clan of Neanderthals.

Genau wie erwartet. Top!

Płyta niemożliwa do odtworzenia w regionie europejskim. Mimo sprzedaży w Europie film można odtworzyć jedynie w odtwarzaczach z regionu amerykańskiego.

Some might criticize it for some small inaccuracies.Some other will challenge the date they chose to write on the back of the box and the opening text.However, once you get passed that and correct the few pieces in your mind, the movie itself is pretty accurate to depict what science has accustomed us to believe was our first steps as a specie. Classic tale of Neanderthals meeting Sapiens moving through Erectus territory.The fictive language feels authentic for as much as one can imagine it to be... And frankly, even if it is one day proven to be all false : This movie is worth seeing at least once. It's touching, epic, funny, and the actors themselves drives it to a whole new level. Their joy is contagious, their pain is felt through, and the obvious cavemen jokes are natural enough to not brake the suspension of disbelief.Now, if only they would have taken the pain to do the subtitles for real... we could even appreciate their linguistic creation to its full extent.Mostly though, the subtitles only provides sound clues like : "primitive speech". Which does not help at all in most cases. Of course it's possible to have some of the "words" in some of the scenes... but that doesn't make it complete.It's not like the movie was hard to understand at all... it's just some subtlety like the name of the characters and the thought behind the verbs that can be easily lost on a first viewing. Because frankly, the sound is not that good for us trying to listen to something we'll never hear elsewhere. It ask of us to piece up together what they could be saying instead of really knowing. Even then, the body language is so clear it's hard to miss the big picture.The documentary that accompanies it is animated by Orson Wells! (Yes, Unicron voicing the narrator for the crew filming the beginning of mankind! Transformers fans will probably catch the prophetic nature of this.)It will let you appreciate how much work is needed to transcribe a VHS tape to DVD with the quality we're accustomed to nowadays.While the movie itself is picture perfect and strongly conserved, the making of is blatantly damaged by time and loosing colour and contrast.To be fair, the most impressive thing to learn in the documentary is the use of real elephants dressed as mammoth for a certain scene!All in all though, I'm very happy to have found back that screen gem.

Non posso che uniformarmi ai giudizi di eccellenza che ho letto sulla pagina di Amazon. Ho acquistato il Blu-Ray in edizione Regno Unito, ma tanto i dialoghi...sono in preistorico e si capisce lo stesso benissimo tutto quello che c'è da capire...un film che parla di tante cose, dei rapporti umani e interrazziali, delle conquiste legate al progresso, dell'apertura all'"altro", della scoperta del sorriso e dell'amore...visto anch'io al cinema quando era uscito, e felicissimo di averlo ritrovato così...