Tag: prehistoric

A Neolithic revenge story seeks to explain the mysterious man found frozen in the Alps.

Written and directed by Felix Randau, and originally release in Germany in 2017 as Der Mann aus dem Eis, Iceman purports to tell the story of a Copper Age man preserved in the frozen Alps for 5,000 years. Beautiful landscapes and harrowing authenticity help balance what might otherwise be a one-dimensional revenge plot.

Kelab (Jürgen Vogel), Kisis (Susanne Wuest), and their clan are living in the Ötztal Alps around 3000 BC, where Kelab protects a fetish called Tineka. The clan is blessed with the birth of a child, but grieved by the loss of its mother. When Kelab is off hunting in the woods, a trio of raiders attack his village, slaughter its inhabitants, and steal their idol. Filled with a desire for revenge, Kelab rescues the newborn and pursues the raiders.

Along the way, Kelab interacts with other Neolithic people, including an old man, Ditob (Franco Nero), and his daughter Mitar (Violetta Schurawlow), in their sparsely populated valley. Can Kelab survive the harsh elements to exact revenge and take back his sacred Tineka?

Iceman was inspired by Ötzi the Iceman. In 1991, Alpine hikers discovered a mummified body partially frozen in ice. Shockingly, scientists dated its age to somewhere between 3400 and 3100 BC. The adult male was so well preserved that scientists were able to determine precisely what he ate in the days before he died. Most intriguingly, they discovered his cause of death was an arrow impaled in his back, compounded by other injuries.

A young hunter must survive on the Mammoth steppe with the help of a wolf during the Upper Paleolithic period in Alpha (2018), written by Daniele Sebastian Wiedenhaupt and directed by Albert Hughes. Hughes is known for films like From Hell and The Book of Eli, but this was Wiedenhaupt’s first produced screenplay. She did a bang up job adapting Hughes’ original story for the screen. Despite stunning visuals and cinematography, and some interesting attempts to reconstruct Paleolithic culture, however, Alpha mainly pulls on moviegoers’ heartstrings with a completely implausible story.

Tribal chieftain Tau (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson) is proud that his son Keda (Kodi Smit-McPhee) has proven himself worthy to accompany them on their annual buffalo hunt, but his wife Rho (Natassia Malthe) is apprehensive. On their long journey to the hunting grounds, they encounter another group of hunters led by Xi (Jens Hultén), and they join forces. Keda is skilled, but impatient and hesitant to kill. Tau instructs him on the need for strength, a lesson Keda will learn the hard way over the coming months as he fights for survival.

While his fellow hunters are stampeding a bison herd off a cliff (an actual hunter-gatherer tactic), a bison tramples Keda, impales him, and hurls him off the edge, where he plunges over 100 yards, suffers multiple broken bones and massive internal hemorrhaging, and dies. Wait, the bison’s horn only snags his coat and he lands safely on a ledge suffering only an injured ankle? Then a flash flood miraculously arrives in the nick of time, providing him a soft place to land when he slips from the rocks? And he doesn’t just drown in the current? … really?

In order to have tension in a survival story, we must think (despite knowing otherwise) there’s a possibility the main character won’t survive, but this improbable scenario plants in the viewer’s mind the idea that the main character literally cannot be killed. All tension evaporates when the hand of God (the screenwriter) comes down and saves Keda from one impossible-to-survive situation after another.