It is so Cold Without Fire!
Undoubtedly Jean-Jacques Annaud is an unconventional director. With only ten films done up to this moment he has managed to impact the audience more than once.
His movies in brief: "Black & White in Color" (1976) won the Best Foreign Film Oscar, "The Name of the Rose" (1986), "The Bear" (1988), the controversial "The Lover" (1992) and "Enemy at the Gates" (2001) a realistic recount of the Battle for Stalingrad completes his works.
In "Quest for Fire" ("La Guerre du Feu 1981) French Cesar Award, Academy of Sci-fi Award and Best Make-up Oscar, tell the story of a cave-man in search of fire, with a vocabulary almost reduced to grunts and growls.
A Cro-Magnon tribe is deprived, after a combat, of its major treasure: fire.
They know the value of fire but hasn't the technique to produce it by themselves. So a group of three tribe-men start the Quest for Fire, a sort of prehistoric Grail Quest.
In their journey they encounter other...
A trio of Cro-Magnons go off in search of fire...
Already people are fretting about this movie Mel Gibson is making about the last days of Christ in which everybody will be speaking Latin and/or Arameic without subtitles. Well, if you are a-feared of such a prospect you can warm up on 1981 Canadian/French production from Jean-Jacques Annaud. "Quest for Fire" ("Le Guerre du feu") should be a good test for you because in this story, set among the Cro-Magnons of eighty thousand years ago, you know neither the characters nor the plot.
The genesis for this story is quite primal. A tribe of Cro-Magnons is attacked by its neighbors and has its fire stolen. This requires a small band to go forth and seek fire, which is necessary to ensure the tribe's survival. The trio consists of the brains of the outfit, Naoh (Everett McGill), the hulking brute, Amoukar (Ron Perlman), and the wiry comic relief, Gaw (Nameer El-Kadi). Along the way they hook up with Ika (Rae Dawn Chong), a young woman who is rescued from slavery...
Excellent Film
Quest for Fire is a film that will not only alter one's perception of modern human behavior but also show the dawn of what we call human civilization. This movie portrays man distilled to his original raw instincts, many of which in today's ultra modern society would be denounced as barbaric and foreign. It is hard to fathom that 8,000 years ago our predecessors had pretty much the same cognitive ability as modern humans do. It is simply the continual growth of technology and civilization that separates us from the characters in Quest for Fire. After knowing this morsel of knowledge, it was apparent that this movie not only defines life in the ancient world but also paints vividly shocking portrait of who we really are. Simply put, watching this film is quite humbling. The film climaxes when the main character discovers that man can create fire. This moment is quite inspirational and thought provoking simply because it is more important than man discovering the atom...
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