Eighty thousand years ago, on broad primeval plains, Naoh (Everett McGill), the bravest warrior of the spear-carrying Ulam tribe, and two fellow-warriors, Amoukar (Ron Perlman) and Gaw (Nameer El-Kadi), are sent out on the sacred mission of finding fire and bringing it back to the Ulam.
While audiences have long exhibited a penchant for movies about the future, few people expected today’s science-fiction generation to go wild over a film set 80,000 years in the past. Yet that’s what has happened with Quest for Fire, an ambitious work that portrays primitive man’s attempts to understand and harness the elements around him.
The domestication of fire was the key development that separated hominids from the rest of the animal kingdom, enabled them to live in hostile environments and spurred the development of language and agriculture. Through this brilliant exercise in backward extrapolation, we get a glimpse of what it might have been like, 80,00 years ago.