Reverse science fiction--speculating not on the future but on the distant past--Quest for Fire is also a fascinating variation on the visual poetry of the CinemaScope western, pitting the lone homo sapien against a vast plane dominated by the unknown. Here, the great equalizer is not firearms but fire itself. The story follows three scouts who are sent out from a busy settlement in search of the precious flame. They encounter wild beasts, and then have the beast in them tamed when they come in contact with a superior tribe and one lad becomes the first of his ilk to find love. The passion of Jean-Jacques Annaud's vision, and the thoroughness of his attempt to recreate it, cannot be denied. Novelist Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange) devised languages based on a phonetic alphabet for the primitive protagonists, and behavioral theorist Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape) was brought in to create a body-language that would effectively translate these screeches and grunts for us. But perhaps, like much of science fiction, Quest of Fire ultimately sketches its picture of a faraway era in preconceptions derived from our own. Village Voice critic Carrie Rickey called the film “an unwelcome lesson in racial supremacy...endow(ing) the invention of patriarchy, missionary sex, ‘fair' warfare, and cultural imperialism with the aura of Great Events in Prehistory.”