La Guerre du feu (1981) - film review

80,000 years ago, the very dawn of human civilisation.  When a tribe of cave-dwellers lose their only source of fire, three of their number set off to seek the fire which the tribe desperately needs to survive.   After several days, they encounter another tribe, who not only possess fire in abundance, but who have also discovered the secret of its creation...

La Guerre du feu was a valiant attempt on the part of Jean-Jacques Annaud, one of France’s most acclaimed directors in the 1980s, to make a convincing epic drama about cavemen in prehistoric times.  The result is not a total success, but neither is it a total failure.  Whilst admittedly some scenes look like very bad out-takes from a Monty Python sketch, the film has exceptional production values and, from a technical point of view, the film could hardly have been better made. Anthony Burgess was even commissioned to invent a primitive language for the cavemen, to give the film that a extra hint of authenticity.  Bizarrely, the film won an Oscar for best make-up.

Whilst the film is visually impressive, and often engaging in its humour and moments of dramatic tension, it is hampered by a thin plot which makes it difficult for the film to maintain the audience’s attention.   For the most part, the film consists of vicious fights between rival tribes of primitive humans (involving some shockingly visceral shots of bodily mutilation) and painfully protracted sequences of the cavemen making their way across overly beautiful prehistoric landscapes.   Too often, the film feels repetitive, slow and gratuitously violent.

Examined too closely, the film also loses its sense of credibility. The film was shot in a number of differing locations (Scotland, Kenya and Canada), and it soon appears improbable that the cavemen could possibly have travelled to such visibly different locations and - miraculously – return to their starting point.  In that respect at least, the film stretches credulity to breaking point.  Also, in spite of the amount of copulation that these early humans appear to get up to in the film, it is surprising that there do not seem to be any children around.  This begs the intriguing question: did our ancestors invent the contraceptive before they learnt how to make fire?

© James Travers 2002

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