[
October 2015 Update: I'm happy to report that
Quest for Fire is now streaming in its original widescreen aspect ratio. About time, Netflix!]
Today I was planning to post a review of a film I was genuinely eager to write up. It's one I think deserves a shout-out not only for its intelligent, near-documentary glimpse into the distant past but for how well it holds up today as an effective and imaginative adventure story. This is how I was going to start (give or take a sentence):
Aside from the Dawn of Man sequence in Stanley Kubrick's 2001, most cinematic accounts of the Stone Age have been relegated to B movies and comedies�
from One Million Years B.C. in 1966 up through 2008's 10,000 B.C. The former, I was surprised to discover, was more than simply a showcase for Raquel Welch and her fur bikini, and proved to be a surprisingly sincere effort at depicting the lives of our prehistoric kin�
even if it did promote the typical 1960s/1970s humbuggery of dinosaurs cohabiting with humans. Such chronological compression reached its apex in the 1981 Ringo Starr comedy, Caveman, an intentionally ridiculous account of Stone-Age man which happened to be released the same year as Quest for Fire, a film that was its polar opposite: that is, an attempt to portray the existence of early humanity with as much realism as possible. Low-budget mammoths (and minor historical inaccuracies) aside,I'm happy to report that Quest for Fire still remains the high water mark for such films, providing an enlightening�
and truly entertaining�
glimpse back in time that exposes our thin veneer of civilization for what it truly is. Read more �
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