Quest for Fire

If you're anything like me then you possibly suffer from a masochistic desire to read subtitles in movies all the time. There's just something about those little yellow letters that add an aesthetic flourish to the film screen; It's the reason I've been watching so many Japanese movies lately, it's the reason I can watch Godard's "Pierrot le Fou" a million times without getting bored, and it's probably the only real reason I enjoyed "Inglourious Basterds" so much. I've watched so many subtitles that I'm now post-reading words with my movies, I've moved on to find the next big thrill and I found it in the form of Jean-Jacques Annaud's 1981 film "Quest for Fire".

Imagine a movie not in English. Easy. Now imagine a movie in a foreign language without subtitles. Frustrating? Now imagine a movie without subtitles that takes place 80,000 years ago and the only languages spoken are non-existent caveman grunts created for the screen by none other than Anthony Burgess himself (author of “A Clockwork Orange”). Pure bliss.

The story is simple enough: A clan of Neanderthal cavemen has fire, probably found during a wildfire somewhere. After their ape-like cousins, Homo Erectus, raid the small cave community, the fire goes out. Three of the cavemen are given the task to find more fire before the winter hits and the community dies. And it is here that the quest begins.

After a scuffle with a more savage band of cannibalistic Neaderthals, the three heroes rescue and befriend two young Homo Sapien women. These Homo Sapiens are far more advanced than the Neanderthals and bring them to their village which has constructed shelters, tools, and FIRE! With the essential element in hand, the men begin the long journey back to their tribe.

The film was shot in a variety of locations, from the Badlands of Canada to the Highlands of Scotland. These stark and sweeping landscapes evoke a lo-fi "Lord of the Rings". However, unburdened by special effects, the film uses cleaver costume and makeup techniques to recreate some of the era's more famous wild beasts, from the Woolly Mammoth to the Saber-Toothed tiger; the mammoths come courtesy of real elephants covered in fur, while the saber-tooth is simply a lioness outfitted with prosthetic teeth.

Out of the three leading cavemen the most recognizable would have to be Ron Pearlman – the face behind prosthetics of Hellboy from well, “Hellboy”, and Vincent from the 1987 television series “Beauty and the Beast”, though he’s pretty beastly as a Neanderthal too. The relative obscurity of the actors, as well and the down to earth film making, gives the film a pseudo-documentary feel, as if you’re watching recorded accounts of live in the stone age. The film paints a vivid picture of where we came from in the past, and inspires us to look ahead at where we are going.