"War of Fire" is an important film made in 1987 by France (in cooperation with Canada).
Judging from the narrative content, this seems to be an ordinary prehistoric thriller. The film depicts the living habits of apes from the perspective of the history of human development, and highlights the importance of fire for their survival from the very beginning. The film also shows the characteristics of their lives concretely and vividly: their way of walking like animals, the habit of eating meat, and even their instinctive reproduction methods and hybrid sexual behaviors. This film can be said to be a meaningful human history film. In France, it is classified as a teaching film. The government's education department stipulates that "War of Fire" should be used as the teaching content of junior high school students and above, so that students can watch and understand the initial living conditions of humans and how they learn from the instinctive animal style. The approach gradually evolved into a developmental process with emotional content.
The narrative content of the film is intuitively an attempt to show the hardships and hardships of human ancestors living on the earth and their close-to-animal life customs. However, the film author is not satisfied with an objective narrative of the life of apes, but to reflect a stage of human evolution, that is, an important stage in the process of how to develop from animality to humanity.
The film "War of Fire" did not hesitate to follow the historical truth and from a biological point of view to show that before Zhicheng, many human behaviors were inevitably animalistic: they ate and slept like animals, they demanded according to their instincts. Look for the opposite sex casually. However, in order to find fire, they developed from instinctive life needs to having certain feelings, that is, the simplest "sympathy" and "mutual pity". This should be considered an advancement for mankind.
As we all know, the reason why humans are superior to animals is that humans have thoughts and feelings that animals do not have. When "War of Fire" shows the initial "thinking" of finding fire, it still has instinctive life needs. However, when expressing "feelings", the film allows the audience to see its initial stage and the inevitability of development. The film does not portray this feeling from the perspective of modern people, but strives to truly express the state of Noah and Ika when they first lived together from the perspective of an ape-man: mutual sympathy and care, resulting in a credible Base. Ika didn’t go to find Noah’s two partners, Amoka and Ke, but nestled beside Noah’s naked body in order to warm him, and she had this choice because she saw Noah’s bravery And kindness.
In this film, Noah and Ika’s love performance is an important proof of the evolution of ape-man to Homo sapiens. They began to understand that they did not want to copulate like animals, but in another way, a kind of more adaptable to feelings. They need to live their lives. Although they hadn't created language to express their affection at the time, their specific behaviors truthfully showed that they have important characteristics that distinguish them from animals.
The theme of the film is not complicated, its focus is to highlight the fundamental difference between animals and people. There is no dialogue in the film. It mainly uses screams and roars to replace modern people’s language expressions. In terms of walking, they use the ape-like walking method in the form of "inner horoscopes". Later, Noah et al. Action has more human characteristics. The ending part of the film is also quite meaningful: Noah is looking at the moon, and Ika comes to him and asks him to stroke his slightly convex abdomen. Although no words are needed, their actions and the situation at the time show the audience. Noah has had a vision for the future of life. What they are concerned about is not the wilderness, the jungle and the beasts, but the sky and the moon.
When shooting this highly appreciative and scientific film, the filmmakers’ creative attitude was very serious. They carried out four years of careful preparation, and the actual shooting took nine months. If compared with a feature film that can usually be shot in one or two months, the filming cycle of "War of Fire" cannot but be considered quite amazing. The film crew has traveled far to Scotland, Canada and Kenya, and invited the American Everett McGill to play Noah, and the French-Vietnamese Zhong Laidong played Ika. In order to avoid scientific fallacies, the film crew also hired scientists Anthony Burgess and Desmond Morris as consultants, in order to achieve a true reproduction of the prehistoric environment and the characters' movements.
The film received wide acclaim when it was screened in Europe. The critics affirmed the novel idea of the film, that is, it is not limited to the expression of people's already common love entanglements, but the initial basis of human love. Fire brought the dawn of civilization to human ancestors; the initial love that primitive people germinated in the struggle to overcome the wild and fight for fire made them one step closer to civilization. This is what the artistically creative "War of Fire" wants to tell the audience.
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