The trailer for the new post-apocalyptic movie The Dog Stars is a clear indicator that director Ridley Scott still hasn’t lost his keen sense for visual storytelling — and it’s fitting that one of his favorite films trades an epic journey at the end of the world for one that takes place at the dawn of time. While on the red carpet for Alien: Romulus, he told Letterboxd what his top four favorite films are, and while he gave some predictable picks like 2001: A Space Odyssey, he threw one major curveball with Quest for Fire. A cult-classic caveman film by Jean-Jacques Annaud, Scott praised the work and it’s easy to see why, given its courage to remain a largely silent movie. Scott said, “A film that people don’t know is so clever and so brilliant — it’s fantastic.”

What Is ‘Quest for Fire’ About?

80,000 years ago, in the prehistoric age, the Ulam tribe is figuring out how to survive. Spending their days fighting off rival tribes and scrounging for food, things seem stable until their measly supply of fire goes out. No one in the tribe knows how to make fire, thinking it’s a finite resource, so the leader sends Naoh (Everett McGill), Amoukar (Ron Perlman), and Gaw (Nicholas Kadi) to explore the land to find fire.

Most of their journey consists of episodes of routine trials and tribulations until they encounter Ika (Rae Dawn Chong) — who they rescue from being kidnapped by another tribe — and she may be the key to finding the fire they desperately need. Quest for Fire exists somewhere in the middle of a series of cross-sections: it’s a story with barely any plot, a cast of characters we observe more than actually “learn” anything about, and a travelogue without the dryness of a nature documentary. It’s a record that relies entirely on empathy, asking you to look past the simplicity and witness what must have been true high drama for our ancient ancestors.

‘Quest for Fire’ Taps Into the Primal Need To Survive

It’s impossible not to immediately take note of how gorgeous the film is in its unvarnished capturing of so many wondrous natural landscapes. Filmed primarily in areas across Kenya and the Scottish Highlands, every location buries you in the harshness with which they crush our hairy protagonists, despite how vast each area is. The journey covers various types of terrain, from quicksand-filled bogs to snow-capped mountain ranges to overgrown savannahs, with the camera often pulled way up into the sky to emphasize how scrawny these individuals seem in the grand scheme of the dog-eat-dog world.

Since the film forgoes any semblance of “backstory” or complicated motivation, it leans more into the unforgiving harshness of the land and the improvised hardscrabble grit of the group, so that the audience will relate through the inherent drive to persevere against the cruelties of nature. Add in sprinkles of prehistoric-flavored action setpieces, like trying to evade sabertoothed tigers and appeasing wooly mammoths so that they stampede an enemy tribe, and it makes Quest for Fire function as high-class adventure silent cinema, thanks to its engaging cast.

‘Quest for Fire’s Cast Brilliantly Shows Evolving Social Skills

If the gnarly eye candy on display isn’t appealing enough for you, then the sociological inquisitiveness embodied by the actors provides the meat on the bone. The film spends a lot of its downtime simply watching these cave people as they communicate in their own language (created by A Clockwork Orange‘s author, Anthony Burgess), pick each other clean, combine verbalization with physical gestures in ways that make their way of life clear to us. It never cheats by giving us subtitles as to what the characters are actually saying, which encourages us to lean forward and pick up on the nuances of their physical behavior to decipher the social dynamics.

The film fulfills the need for a conventional story arc by showing how our protagonists gradually learn how to engage in more sophisticated interpersonal behavior that we modern day humans take for granted. For instance, our characters learn the hilarity of getting bonked on the head, the proper way to have missionary sex, and the wisdom of not carrying fire into a body of water — all making incremental steps toward a better functioning way of life.

In that vein, the cast should be commended for how they can effectively communicate a cohesive theme through their collective action. Even if they don’t have fully developed “personalities,” each character has enough distinct habits and tics that you find enjoyment in how their mentalities bump against each other. It’s fun to watch the main trio all be such “knuckle-draggers” in the beginning, and then gratifying to see how their intelligence has improved thanks to their experiences with the more advanced Ika and how their sense of social nicety improves.

The actors don’t so much give “performances” as they embody an entire sub-concept of humanity that is in flux in response to a world that demands that they not remain stagnant. That combination of grand visuals, anthropological examination of the limits of human intelligence, and marveling at the dangers of the wide world make it obvious why Ridley Scott would consider it such an important film to his cinematic sensibilities, and therefore why it must be seen in order to gain insight on Scott’s vision.