The Clan of the Cave Bear

Director Michael Chapman, an experienced cinematographer, is skilled in conveying ideas through pictures -- quite an advantage in a movie about people who aren't especially verbal. And Chapman's cinematographer, Jan De Bont, has a varied palette that responds to the visual demands of a world in transition. Read full review

[It] has a gentle approach to its characters and an occasionally striking visual style. What it doesn't have is much momentum or originality. Read full review

After much time with this soggy, quarrelsome clan, your sympathies may lie entirely with the bear. Read full review

Greater drama and prehistorical weight are to found in the earlier Quest For Fire or the BBC's Walking With Cavemen, and without so much as a trailer for extras, this feels like a relic. Read full review

The Clan of the Cave Bear is a dull, overly genteel rendition of Jean M. Auel's novel. Handsomely produced on rugged Canadian exteriors, this is the story of pre-history's first feminist. Read full review

Mostly, though, the problem with the movie lies in the story, which is slow and episodic. Ayla learns how to use a sling (even though women aren't supposed to hunt). Ayla learns the tricks of the medicine woman. Ayla goes to a Neanderthal convention. Read full review

Devotees of John Sayles' witty, literate screenplays will be disappointed by the repartee of subtitled grunts, while beneath the film's apparent plea for tolerance lies the offensive (if quite possibly true) assumption that tall, tanned Californian blondes represent the highest form of human life. Read full review

The filmmakers made no effort to empathize with their prehistoric characters, to imagine what it might have really been like back then. Read full review

The Clan of the Cave Bear is dog. [27 Jan 1986, p.69]

Clan's greatest fault, however, is simply that it is an epic bore. [28 Feb 1986, p.11]

The cinematic adaptation of the novel, however, is so laughably awful that Auel later sued the producers for creating such an inaccurate work. Read full review

It's all as foolish as can be, and tedious in the bargain. The Clan of the Cave Bear acts as a parody of the earlier, more accomplished Quest for Fire, but since even that film was funny despite itself, this is not much of an accomplishment. On the evidence, it is hard to tell which way Hannah, who was Ron Howard's mermaid in Splash, is traveling on the old evolutionary ladder. [27 Man 1986, p.C6]