By Ben Bussey
The origin of the species. Not a bad name for a book, that. Also, it’s something that will always be of interest to anyone with a vaguely inquiring mind: the question of just where we human beings came from, how civilisation as we know it came to develop, and how we existed before. As well as being a long-standing area of scientific and historical research, it’s also something that has fired the imagination of storytellers for eons, all the way into the age of cinema, where we’ve seen primitive people clashing with prehistoric beasts in the likes of Harry O. Hoyt’s The Lost World, Don Chaffey’s One Million Years BC, and of course Jim Wynorski’s Dinosaur Island… ahem.
Back in 1981, director Jean-Jacques Annaud sought to unite the realms of imagination and real science with Quest for Fire. Billed as a ‘science fantasy adventure,’ the movie is set around 80,000 years BC, following an early homo sapiens tribe, who have found fire but don’t yet have the smarts to create it themselves. When an attack of troglodytes results in their only flame being extinguished, they need to go find it again, and so three of their number – Everett McGill, Nameer El-Kadi, and the king of make-up movies Ron Perlman – venture out into a harsh wilderness to find someone who does have fire, and take it; or maybe, just maybe, learn how to make it on their own.
Now, I’m going to level with you: I found Quest for Fire pretty tough going. One can hardly accuse a 90 minute movie of outstaying its welcome, but when it’s 90 minutes of unintelligible grunting without too much in the way of discernible plot, it can rather put a strain on the attention span. The ample extras on the disc, including an in-depth making-of documentary, do put it all into context, demonstrating the huge amount of research that went into every area of putting the film together, including a unique language devised for the film by none other than Clockwork Orange writer Anthony Burgess. All very impressive of course, but does it necessarily make for a film you’ll actually want to watch? It’s challenging stuff, for sure; I can honestly say I was as often frustrated by the film as I was mystified by it.
We can see a great many parallels here with many of the tribal movies that have come since, such as John Boorman’s The Emerald Forest, Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, and indeed James Cameron’s Avatar; but where those films for the most part prioritised the action-adventure elements over the anthropological, Quest for Fire seeks to balance the two more evenly, and I’m not sure it ever quite strikes the right balance. There are large sections in which it has the feel of a nature documentary, where the only thing missing seems to be David Attenborough’s narration. Even so, there’s no shortage of thrills and spills. There are numerous quite gruesome battle sequences, put together in a traditional action-adventure style, with stirring music from Philippe Sadre. We also have a fair few animal attack scenes featuring real wolves and lions; way more exciting than the almost certainly CG-addled takes on such material would be today. Even so, the somewhat unconvincing woolly mammoths are a little harder to take seriously; and indeed, some of the primitive make-up jobs have aged pretty badly, which might result in unintentional comedy value for some.
Then there’s the question of sex. This being a tale of primitive man, we don’t get a lot in the way of tender loving romance; perhaps unsurprisingly, there are a fair few moments here which can only be classed as rape scenes. As such, it’s interesting the BBFC have passed the film uncut as a 15; presumably this is down to the anthropological angle, the sense that this film is simply showing things the way they were from a detached perspective. Even so, there is a hint of old-fashioned love story in here, as Everett McGill’s hairy northlander grows romantically attached to Rae Dawn Chong’s lithe and perpetually naked girl from the south. Her presence amongst the three men seems to prompt a change in attitudes among the men; they develop courtesy and humour, which only serves to boost their camaraderie. It is interesting how the film conveys character development without the use of recognisable dialogue, and not by having everyone shout “akeeta, akeeta” all the time as was always the case in the old Hammer cave people movies.
Quest for Fire most definitely isn’t going to be for everyone. It is without doubt a very unique piece of filmmaking, and while its tightrope walk between art-house experimentation and rip-roaring adventure doesn’t quite work for me, I can see how it might well capture (or even, as the trailer below puts it, ‘arouse’) the imagination of some viewers.
Quest for Fire is out now on Region 2 DVD and Blu-ray, from Second Sight.