Quest for Fire

A tragi-comic adventure from the dawn of human history. Following an attack by prowling, bloodthirsty apes, a beaten and diminished tribe of Neanderthals relocate from their once cosy cave to a sodden marshland, losing their access to a crackling campfire in the process. Like the hirsute maniacs who attacked them, this collective of proto-people cannot craft fire on their own, they must steal it from somewhere, or someone, else. Quest for Fire is set on an unusually expansive plain that is home to several distinct species of human being, each at wildly different stages of evolutionary progress: from ogres who gobble up other hominids to a waning settlement of Homo sapiens who cover themselves in ash and, culturally, prize Rubenesque women. We spend the most time with the flame-seeking Neanderthals, a not particularly bright subset who are just smart enough to know that they should lightly toast any animal flesh they consume. 

This tribe's purchase on civilisation, such as it is, revolves around tending their great campfire. When not hunting or gathering, the younger males jab their penises at anybody that dares bare their backside. This propensity for coitus more ferarum is actually a trackable plot point in director Jean-Jacques Annaud's film. Rae Dawn Chong's Ika, a member of the cinder tribe who falls in with three of the Neanderthals after they kill several of the cannibals, has an Eve-like tendency to dispense knowledge. First she imparts the gift of laughter, a hitherto unknown ability to recognise and respond to the slapstick ill-fortune of others. Later, and perhaps more crucially, when she tires of Everett McGill's Naoh - the film's Cambellian striver - roughly mounting her from behind, Ika demands a stake in the sex act, manoeuvring herself so that she is face-to-face with the man penetrating her. By establishing this (slightly more consensual) connection, Ika slows Naoh's bestial rutting, a development that eventually leads to a pair-bond not seen anywhere else on this primitive Pangaea.