Quest For Fire

Year: 1981

Grade: B

Country: Canada

Director: Annaud

Review

set 80,000 years ago when fire was of the utmost importance and languages were in their infancy, this film follows three tribesmen on their quest for fire. there’s no dialogue to speak of (pardon the pun) and the characters are far from typical (they’re neanderthals), and yet it’s a remarkably entertaining and well-paced film. you’d think that it would get slow, but it somehow manages to avoid that. i think there are few reasons for this: first, it has a sense of humor – it’s not an overly heavy film. second, it’s a subject matter that is rarely breached outside of academic texts…we’ve seen plenty of “period” films, but few of them go more than a couple thousand years back…this one goes back 80,000 years. and lastly, it’s a film that is boundless…it doesn’t have any cultural or time boundaries on it. the spoken language that the characters employ is completely made up and primitive, and the film speaks to fairly universal themes of love, life, survival, our origins, success and defeat. the film speaks in broad terms and uses our early ancestors as its characters so it’s likely to be enjoyed by all. much of the film rests on the acting and it is uniformly good. i’m not sure if it’s really easy or really hard to act like a prehistoric man, but either way they pull it off.