Monday, May 27, 2013

Movie review: Quest For Fire


Quest For Fire

The Oscar for Best Makeup is icing on the cake, but let's face it, nobody really knows what your basic early human Cro-Magnon looked like.


My delight in this film has nothing to do with makeup. The "moment" in Quest For Fire is Naoh (Everett McGill) watching in epiphanic amazement as a young boy of the Ivaka tribe makes fire with two sticks.

Imagine that all your life you've been driving a succession of stolen cars that mysteriously stop running after a while, and you could never figure it out. One day you see a young fella with his Hyundai at one of those places that have pairs of big shiny machines, each with an attached  hose and nozzle, and this kid is sticking the nozzle into the recessed pipe over the left rear fender of his car and….

Suddenly you feel like a Cro-Magnon.

And the movie is heroic in many ways: tribesmen sacrificing themselves for their fellow early humans, salvation as a reward for good deeds, a love interest that makes a baby and keeps Mom and Dad together, staring at the same moon that you and I see….

And the monosyllabic proto-language is surprisingly easy to decipher, with body language and facial expressions contributing just as much to understanding as they do today.

Great low-key adventure film, straight, no chaser.



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