Ahead of the release of Year Oneand Ice Age 3, JOE GRIFFINlooks back (way back) at the history of prehistoric movies
THIS summer, movie audiences will be invited to speculate about ancient times and our hairy forbears. There's the hunter/gatherer comedy Year One, animated threequel Ice Age 3and (arguably) Land of the Lost(which has Will Ferrell trying to outrun a Tyrannosaurus Rex).
For makers of prehistoric films the greatest challenge is also (arguably) their number-one selling point: we can only speculate about life at that time from the relatively sparse evidence our ancestors left us.
Yes, films such as Quest for Firegive a respectful and measured approximation of what life was like back then, but frankly, these films are not made by (or for) historians. If all we can offer is conjecture about the era, maybe we're better off with the man-verses-dinosaur adventures of One Million Years BC. We all know which type of film the cinema-going public prefers – while relatively few people can recall what Ron Perlman looked like in Quest for Fire(an even hairier Tom Waits, in case you're wondering), just about everyone knows the iconic image of Raquel Welch from One Million Years BC.
Much of the appeal of revisiting ancient times as a setting lies in its simplicity and danger; the wild, feral environment that our ancestors inhabited feels like another world entirely. Is it any wonder that some prehistoric action movies are similar to fantasy adventures such as Conan the Barbarian? Here's a beginner's guide to the films of our hairy distant relatives ...
ONE MILLION BC AND ONE MILLION YEARS BC
So fun they made it twice – One Million BC(1940), directed by Hal Roach and Hal Roach Jr starred Lon Chaney Jr and Victor Mature. It featured warring tribes of Cro-Magnon men in combat with various monsters, including dinosaurs. The film was remade by Hammer Film Productions in 1966 as One Million Years BCfeaturing Raquel Welch in her gloriously historically inaccurate fur bikini.
The mighty Ray Harryhausen brought his usual character and humour to the monsters, though some of them, including a giant spider, were real creatures superimposed. The movie’s poster audaciously bragged that “This is the way it was ...”
10,000 BC
Director and co-writer Roland Emmerich, probably still best known for Independence Day, seems at first glance to be striving for some semblance of accuracy. The humans have to contend with sabre-tooth tigers and woolly mammoths as opposed to dinosaurs and the characters have seemingly ancient names like D'Leh (as opposed to, say, Britney). The film-makers even make allusions to the birth of traditional farming.
However, the multi-ethic English-speaking cast, boat sails and metalwork, and even a metal tooth, reveal 10,000 BCto be as inaccurate as any other film set in that time. They might as well have thrown in a few pterodactyls and velociraptors.
QUEST FOR FIRE
Set more than 80,000 years ago, this adventure directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud is arguably the last word (the last grunt?) on prehistoric movies. It follows an odyssey of three cavemen in search of fire.
Annaud, who also made The Bear and Four Brothers, has a wonderful knack for telling stories without conventional dialogue. It's ironic, so, that the dialect invented for the film by Anthony Burgess became one of the most talked-about aspects of the film. The caveman make-up is pretty great too.
ICE AGE
This successful animated series features few cavepeople, but instead anthropomorphised animals from in and around (presumably) the last ice age. Woolly mammoths, usually sidelined to trampling duties in prehistoric films, have been promoted in this series to joke-telling and even romantic subplots.
CAVEMAN
Ringo Starr appears with his future wife and former Bond girl Barbara Bach (they got together on set) alongside Dennis Quaid and Shelly Long in this comedy set in "one zillion years BC". Slapstick, dinosaurs, stoner jokes and giant fried pterodactyl eggs feature. Coincidentally, this was released in 1981, the same year as Quest for Fire. It too had non-English-speaking cavemen.
YEAR ONE
Starring Jack Black (as a hunter) and John Cena (as a gatherer), this new comedy mixes the buddy movie road-trip formula with well-known Biblical stories. Unlike Quest for Fireand Caveman, the characters in Year One speak modern English (Cain tells Abel, for example, "You are called suck!"). Impressively, the film features slapstick jokes concerning both hunting and gathering.
2001
Stanley Kubrick's philosophical science fiction epic is likely not the first film that comes to mind when discussing prehistoric films. However, Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke did acknowledge our hairy predecessors with an opening sequence entitled The Dawn of Man.
Whichever primate first used a tool back then, the film argues, set the wheel in motion for evolution and ultimately space travel. Incidentally, the extraordinary simian make-up didn't receive an Oscar that year; it was beaten by another great monkey movie, Planet of the Apes.
CALIFORNIA MAN
1990s Encino, California would not seem to be an ideal time and place one would go to in search of ancient man, but when two teenage geeks (played by Pauly Shore and Sean Astin) discover a frozen caveman, slapstick hi-jinks ensue. Thankfully, once they thaw him out and scrub him down, the discovery doesn’t have a sloping forehead or bad posture – instead he takes the form of handsome Brendan Fraser.
JURASSIC PARK
Dinosaurs once again breathe the same air as man, but this time it’s because of fancy science-fiction technology. Blood from fossilised mosquitos contains dino-DNA and voilá: instant dino-mahem!
The success of this franchise led some (including this writer) to hope for a return of dinosaurs to blockbusters, but, a few cameos aside, and the recent King Kongnotwithstanding, their movie career is all but extinct.
