The prehistoric man movie is a sub-genre that's been around since the earliest days of the cinema. Even D. W. Griffith and Buster Keaton each had a go at it back in the silent days.

However, the type of film one usually associates with the subject is more along the lines of One Million Years BC and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth rather than Man's Genesis.

Now comes Jean-Jacques Annaud's Quest for Fire, a Canadian financed feature shot on spectacular locations in Scotland, Kenya and Canada.

But Quest for Fire isn't the average prehistoric monster movie - no stop motion dinosaurs, no busty starlets flaunting their outsize measurements in fur bikinis. Quest for Fire is a documentary-style picturisation of life 80,000 years ago and centres around the importance of fire to man and his eternal quest for the source of energy and warmth.

Quest for Fire could have been an extremely tedious exercise, an upmarket Creatures the World Forgot (The Hammer movie which couldn't afford the talents of a Harryhausen or a Danforth), complete with non-dialogue grunting and assorted tribes at various levels of development. What Annaud has rightfully decided, in collaboration with screenwriter Gerard Brach and producer Michael Gruskoff is to approach Quest for Fire as an adventure movie. Certainly it's shored up with reams of research and comes equipped with a "vocabulary" devised by Anthony Burgess and a body language courtesy of Desmond Morris, but the core of the film comes from Jean-Jacques Annaud's understanding of the cinematic medium.

Quest for Fire is actually a very savage film (savage enough for the British censor to snip a scene or two to guarantee the film an AA certificate) and in that respect is fairly uncompromising. Certainly one is aware that the nominal hero Naoh (Everett McGill) is sure to triumph in the end in his quest for fire, but other major characters are likely, and often do, succumb to the violence of the milieu.

As Annaud admits, the film combines all the classic elements of great cinematic entertainment. There's girl/boy romance, action, suspense, narrow escapes, hair breadth rescues, humour and sex. In this respect, Quest for Fire offers little that is new. What it does do, however, is to offer staple ingredients within a new setting and manages to blend the mix into something quite new in filmed entertainment.

Annaud's visual sense is acute - Quest for Fire is probably one of the few films to be made entirely on location with a minimum of artificial lighting which really extracts the most from its virgin settings. Nature itself has supplied the best set designer in the business, so even when a herd of woolly mammoths appear or a pair of sabre-toothed lions wanders on (a sequence which runs from suspense to comedy), then the effect is totally believable.

The combined talents of Burgess and Morris also add much to the ambiance of the film and I for one found it quite extraordinary to see a large audience so gripped by a film without conventional dialogue exchanges. In effect, Annaud has taken the very basic notion of cinema and made a truly international feature.

Annaud's fine cinematic style is greatly helped by some wonderful performances, particularly from Ron Perlman as Amoukar. Buried under make-up appliances by Christopher Tucker, Perlman manages to give Amoukar a fully rounded character performance and virtually steals every scene he is in. It's ironic that this, the performance of the year, will probably go unacknowledged at the various award ceremonies, whether it be Hollywood or London.

When invited to a preview of Quest for Fire, I must admit I thought it was going to be a chore. Having seen a great number of stills from the film and read several "previews" in worthy film journals, I fully expected it to be an honourable movie. And as is often the case with honourable movies, a boring one too. I also wasn't won over by 20th Century-Fox's Anthropology Wars catchline "A Science Fantasy Adventure".

I certainly didn't expect a movie so rich in entertainment and genuine emotion which seems to race through its hundred minute running time like an express train.

Quest for Fire is certainly a unique entertainment which deserves the widest possible audience.

Starburst magazine, issue #46

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