I am giving four stars for the acting and cinematography, which were excellent.
What bites is the degree to which the movie strayed from the book. Now, I realize that some of this would be inevitable. But the screenwriters took it too far, as if they didn't get the spirit of the books. They essentially made it an altogether different story with the same names. The movie lost me after the first scenes depicting the earthquake and the cave lion attack, which were done well. After that, I didn't recognize it. I'm talking about major differences in both plot and character.
Plot: The movie says Ayla is "the first of the Others that the Clan had seen." What about the man with the broken arm, whom Iza's grandmother had treated for his injuries? It is The Mammoth Hunters, the third book in the series, that finally reveals just who the man was, but the story is told in CotCB.
Plot: Ayla is not pregnant at the time of her exile. She does not give birth in solitude. As a matter of fact, she doesn't even reach full adulthood until long after she is caught using the weapon, the crime for which she is exiled (death cursed) in the first place.
Plot: The movie suggests that no one would provide for Durc simply because Ayla had no mate, and her adopted father could not himself hunt. In fact, the baby was half Cro-Magnon. The Neanderthals had never seen a mixture before and didn't understand the combination of features. They saw Durc as hideously deformed, even more so than Creb. It was for that reason that the men of the Clan had wanted to leave him to die, not just because he would be a welfare child.
Character: Broud has been raping Ayla repeatedly. Like modern rapists, he is actually getting his jollies from making Ayla do something she hates. Finally, during the last rape, she is so happy about being pregnant that she doesn't care anymore and doesn't react. To put it as delicately as possible, this completely deflates Broud, and he can't continue. So far so good. But then one of the women who are watching immediately takes a dig at Broud's wife Oga, using a stick in her hand to illustrate her point, and the women giggle. Mrs. Auel had made it clear in her book that 1.) The Neanderthals were not able to smile or laugh, and 2.) The women are genetically programmed to be so submissive and fearful of the men, that they would never have laughed about a man's shortcomings even if they could.
Character: Brun also is seen smiling, something that he should not have been able to do.
Character: Blond, blue-eyed Ayla is seen as terribly ugly by the Clan, because she is so drastically different. Her height and her propensity for hunting make her, though she seems the ideal of feminine beauty to us, appear to the Clan as something of a butch. So why would Brug, the blue-eyed Clan (which is doubtful) have ignored Uba, a young woman from the highest line of medicine women, in favor of so-called ugly and unladylike Ayla? The movie suggests that had Brug not been killed in the bear ceremony, he would have possibly pursued a mating. I have trouble adapting to that. Which leads me to--
Plot: There is no Brug in the Clan of the Cave Bear book. It was Gorn who was killed in the bear ceremony. Brug doesn't come along until Plains of Passage. He is also known as Brugar, and then he is a different person entirely.
Plot: The hallucination Ayla experiences after she follows the mog-urs into the cave is nowhere near the book. Also, the movie shows Ayla being summoned to the cave, drawn by Creb/Mog-ur's voice calling to her by name. Actually, for her to be there was deadly taboo. The movie did not make this clear.
Plot AND Character: After making Broud leader, Brun would not have had the power to then fire him. And Broud's falling to the ground in abject humility after Brun's chastisement of him would not have happened.
The playing-with-the-echo scene, I understand, is simply a method by which they showed the passage of time as Ayla grew to be a woman. Seemed a little cheesy to me, though. I had wondered why in the heck she would be standing there repeatedly calling out her own name. It took me a few viewings to realize that she was, in fact, playing with an echo.
Kudos to the actors, to the makeup artists, to the people in charge of scenery, etc. Not-so-kudos to the screenwriters. I think they blew it.
What bites is the degree to which the movie strayed from the book. Now, I realize that some of this would be inevitable. But the screenwriters took it too far, as if they didn't get the spirit of the books. They essentially made it an altogether different story with the same names. The movie lost me after the first scenes depicting the earthquake and the cave lion attack, which were done well. After that, I didn't recognize it. I'm talking about major differences in both plot and character.
Plot: The movie says Ayla is "the first of the Others that the Clan had seen." What about the man with the broken arm, whom Iza's grandmother had treated for his injuries? It is The Mammoth Hunters, the third book in the series, that finally reveals just who the man was, but the story is told in CotCB.
Plot: Ayla is not pregnant at the time of her exile. She does not give birth in solitude. As a matter of fact, she doesn't even reach full adulthood until long after she is caught using the weapon, the crime for which she is exiled (death cursed) in the first place.
Plot: The movie suggests that no one would provide for Durc simply because Ayla had no mate, and her adopted father could not himself hunt. In fact, the baby was half Cro-Magnon. The Neanderthals had never seen a mixture before and didn't understand the combination of features. They saw Durc as hideously deformed, even more so than Creb. It was for that reason that the men of the Clan had wanted to leave him to die, not just because he would be a welfare child.
Character: Broud has been raping Ayla repeatedly. Like modern rapists, he is actually getting his jollies from making Ayla do something she hates. Finally, during the last rape, she is so happy about being pregnant that she doesn't care anymore and doesn't react. To put it as delicately as possible, this completely deflates Broud, and he can't continue. So far so good. But then one of the women who are watching immediately takes a dig at Broud's wife Oga, using a stick in her hand to illustrate her point, and the women giggle. Mrs. Auel had made it clear in her book that 1.) The Neanderthals were not able to smile or laugh, and 2.) The women are genetically programmed to be so submissive and fearful of the men, that they would never have laughed about a man's shortcomings even if they could.
Character: Brun also is seen smiling, something that he should not have been able to do.
Character: Blond, blue-eyed Ayla is seen as terribly ugly by the Clan, because she is so drastically different. Her height and her propensity for hunting make her, though she seems the ideal of feminine beauty to us, appear to the Clan as something of a butch. So why would Brug, the blue-eyed Clan (which is doubtful) have ignored Uba, a young woman from the highest line of medicine women, in favor of so-called ugly and unladylike Ayla? The movie suggests that had Brug not been killed in the bear ceremony, he would have possibly pursued a mating. I have trouble adapting to that. Which leads me to--
Plot: There is no Brug in the Clan of the Cave Bear book. It was Gorn who was killed in the bear ceremony. Brug doesn't come along until Plains of Passage. He is also known as Brugar, and then he is a different person entirely.
Plot: The hallucination Ayla experiences after she follows the mog-urs into the cave is nowhere near the book. Also, the movie shows Ayla being summoned to the cave, drawn by Creb/Mog-ur's voice calling to her by name. Actually, for her to be there was deadly taboo. The movie did not make this clear.
Plot AND Character: After making Broud leader, Brun would not have had the power to then fire him. And Broud's falling to the ground in abject humility after Brun's chastisement of him would not have happened.
The playing-with-the-echo scene, I understand, is simply a method by which they showed the passage of time as Ayla grew to be a woman. Seemed a little cheesy to me, though. I had wondered why in the heck she would be standing there repeatedly calling out her own name. It took me a few viewings to realize that she was, in fact, playing with an echo.
Kudos to the actors, to the makeup artists, to the people in charge of scenery, etc. Not-so-kudos to the screenwriters. I think they blew it.