R'lyeh Review 004

R'LYEH REVIEW

Issue 004

Quest for Fire
Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud
Screen play by Gerard Brach

(Reviewed by C. J. Henderson)

Three men plod their way across a lost wilderness, tracking a dangerous group of cannibalistic savages. Suddenly, they realize they are being trailed themselves --- by sabre-tooth tigers. Unlike most movie heroes of the past, instead of fighting the cats, the trio breaks into terrified flight, racing across the plain for a lone tree in the distance. They scramble upward into its branches, inches away from the impatient sets of fangs below. Hours pass. The cats don't leave. The tree dwellers, growing hungry, decide to sample the leaves. A day passes; so do most of the leaves. Finally, in the middle of the night, one of the three falls from his branch. He scrambles screamingly back into the safety of the tree, only to discover the tigers have deserted their post.

Although this sequence sounds as if it's from "The Three Stooges in Dinosaur Land", it isn't. It takes place in Jean-Jacques Annaud's bold new epic, Quest for Fire. And, lest one get the idea it is a comedy, or just another caveman flick, let it be underlined that it isn't. Masterfully painted across the screen, it is the most impressive film ever made on the subject of man's distant past.

Quest for Fire is the most scientifically accurate film of its type. No dinosaurs roam the landscape of 80,000 years ago. Savage Neanderthals fight with cunning, but not with honor. No English is spoken; there are no blondes with smooth skin and alluring curves; the past is not presented as romantic, noble, or endearing. Annaud's world is more than dangerous; it is a horrific nightmare of fangs and the senseless slaughter which accompanies blind survival. It is also a fascinating study in the most basic levels of human nature.

In the film's opening, the Ulam tribe is attacked by a stronger tribe, the cannibalistic Wagabou. During the battle, the Ulam are almost entirely wiped out, and their fire is stolen. With their survival at stake, the tribe sends its three bravest warriors --- Naoh, Amoukar, and Gaw --- on (you guessed it) a quest for fire. The Ulam do not possess the secret of fire-making, and must rely on either accidents of nature or raids on other tribes to secure it.

In the course of their quest, the three protagonists learn several lessons. In fact, the film condenses many of the important trials and discoveries of primitive man into this one adventure. Interestingly, laughter is treated as a discovery as important as long-range weapons. The most important discovery, however, is that so serious a film could be made in today's atmosphere of comic-fantasy and widescreen pulp adventure movies.

The culmination of three arduous years of preparation and exhaustive research and a fourth year of filming, Quest for Fire is Annaud's first international film. "It was as difficult as I anticipated," Annaud admits. "It took a longtime, but this picture is so much a part of me that it is now a baby of mine." The director was drawn to the project by the novel of J. H. Rosny on which the film is based, "The book has an essential respect for those early insignificant creatures," recalls Annaud, "and of course, its central theme was immensely exciting --- man's discovery of the means of making and controlling fire, which anthropologists now agree was a giant step forward in mankind's evolution."

The film is more than exciting, however. There is a strong feeling of deja vu; a sense of racial memory permeates the production, strongly enhanced by the scientific accuracy of the film. One of the main pieces of craft which helps lend such believability to the movie is the language of the Ulam tribe. Created by Anthony Burgess and Desmond Morris, both the verbal and nonverbal communication depicted in the film is stunning in its seeming authenticity.

But beyond the language, beyond the realistic creatures and landscapes, the savage confrontations, the carefully crafted make-up and costumes, and even the sense of the primordial which permeates the movie, there is yet another aspect of the film which draws viewers in without their being aware of it.

By studiously avoiding the standard cliches of the genre, Annaud has hidden within his film the very message so many other moviemakers have failed to deliver although they tried hard. Too often in the past, we have been asked to identify with heroic cave-types who fought with a sense of duty, protected the weak, braved untold dangers for little reward, and in short acted like knights in shining bearskins. As should have been expected, most people have trouble identifying with someone who acts better than they do.

In Quest for Fire, however, the protagonists are a believable bunch. They steal what they need. They run in wild-eyed terror from what they know they cannot kill. They go to the bathroom, play silly tricks on each other, and worry about where their next meal is coming from --- just like "regular" people. Annaud has made a truly universal film, one which speaks to every man and woman on the face of the planet. His characters are much easier to identify with than the pompous self-absorbed families in the "real-life" pictures such as Shoot the Moon, or Ordinary People. I've never known anyone like the people in those films. On the other hand, everyone knows the characters from Quest for Fire. They are the forefathers of mankind, and if we look around at today's world, we can see that we are not all that removed from them.

There is true excitement as the Ulam finally try their hand at making fire. Everyone in the audience wants them to succeed. By the end of the picture, there is a primal need on the part of the audience to see the Ulam triumph. It is not like waiting for Han Solo to rescue Luke from Darth Vader, nor like counting off the minutes until Jamie Lee Curtis can escape her newest would-be murderer. There is a tension in the theater that is born of desperation; if the Ulam failed to master fire, it would be more than a let-down to the viewer; it would be a death sentence. Sighs of honest relief sound from every corner at the first wisps of smoke produced.

The Ulam's victory is the audience's justification. After having viewed everything that is wrong with mankind on the screen, there has to be at least some small amount of hope given as a balance. The end of the picture, with the young "cave couple" gazing upward at the stars in wonder, is as powerful a release from despair as any other yet filmed.

Quest for Fire is possibly the best fact-based science-fiction film ever made. Although it may draw considerable flack from blind and fearful organizations such as the Moral Majority or the Catholic Church, it should be able to weather any attack. Simplistic, and yet brilliant, it is the most optimistic film released so far in the '80s.

YADDITH AND YUGGOTH REVISTED

"The Dreams in the House of Weir"
Lin Carter
Weird Tales #1, Zebra Books, 1980

"Documents in the Case of Elizabeth Akeley"
Richard A. Lupoff
Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 1982

(Reviewed by Robert M. Price)

Elsewhere in this issue you've read S. T. Joshi's analysis of Lovecraft's alien worlds, including Yaddith and Yuggoth, the only two that play any significant role in his fiction. It's no surprise that other writers have made imaginative voyages to these two planets. In fact, the only surprise is that more of them haven't done it. At any rate the visitors in question are Lin Carter and Richard Lupoff.

Carter's story "The Dreams in the House of Weir" is a sequel of sorts to the Lovecraft-Price collaboration "Through the Gates of the Silver Key," with a heavy dose of "The Dreams in the Witch House" thrown in. Basically what happens is that Hareton Payne, translator of ancient orientalia, has rented an incredibly ancient country manor in England, to try to get some work done. Entries from his journal (which form the main body of the story) reveal that he begins to be troubled by a strange series of dreams in which he inhabits the body of the arthropod-anthropoid Kzoora, a wizard on Yaddith. He is occupied trying to keep the gargantuan Dholes at bay. This task is considerably more difficult since the mysterious departure of fellow-wizard Zkauba (Randolph Carter).

While all this is going on, Payne's wife believes she catches glimpses of something suspiciously Dhole-shaped slithering among the hedges. You can guess what happens --- eventually the dream reality overtakes the mundane one, and the results are none too pretty. All right, all right --- it is a bit too obvious, even too formulaic (the ending: "The window! --- Merciful God, that Face!"). But a few months after I first read it, it had sort of grown on me. In retrospect, perhaps blurred a bit in my memory, it seemed to be a reasonably effective slice of nightmare. Taking off from the premise of the earlier Lovecraft-Price story (i.e., that one mind is reincarnated in several personal "facets" all over

the universe), the story turns a metaphysical doctrine into a living horror. It shows what happens when the dimensions go wrong and realities overlap and violate one another. We see poor Payne slipping feverishly from one reality to another in a hazy downward spiral that bottoms out in Hell. So read it, and then a few months later ask yourself how you liked it.

"Documents in the Case of Elizabeth Akeley" is Richard Lupoff's sequel to HPL's "The Whisperer in Darkness". This tale is not only enjoyable reading, but is particularly interesting for several reasons besides. The central premise is that Elizabeth Akeley is the granddaughter of Henry Akeley. She is the mediumistic priestess of a California UFO-cult,"The Spiritual Light Brotherhood", descended from the old "Starry Wisdom Church" of New England. Lupoff thus connects the extraterrestrial elements of "The Whisperer inDarkness" and "The Haunter of the Dark" (which is pretty justifiable --- again see "Lovecraft's Other Planets" in this issue). And he updates the Starry Wisdom Sect in a particularly plausible way, since there are plenty of groups like this today.

Speaking of updating, modern science is pretty sure that Pluto is not inhabited by fungoid crustaceans or anybody else, so Lupoff has quietly pushed Yuggoth back one orbit. It is now the unknown tenth planet, so far undiscovered be cause its orbital path is at right angles to the ecliptic! (In fact, scientists do suspect there may be a trans-Plutonian world somewhere outside the standard orbital plane. )

But the most interesting part of Lupoff's tale is the implication that, back in "The Whisperer in Darkness", it actually was Akeley (or at least his bottled brain) that Wilmarth was talking to. Yet it was still a trap, albeit a well-intentioned one. Akeley himself, not his alien captors, was trying to persuade Wilmarth to join him in exploring the universe. And in the present story, Akeley has returned and summons his granddaughter to the Vermont woods. He tries to seduce her into embarking on a similar interstellar odyssey, while he puts her vacant human form to other uses. . . .

Both sequels are worth reading for their own sake, though personally I get the biggest kick out of seeing what the writers have done with their Lovecraftian sources.