Summary
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...
Review
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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