User reviews

This film is similar to "Clan of the Cave Bear", but with much more crude violence and shockingly repulsive content. A young blond Cro-Magnon hunter (Kruger) is nearly killed and left for dead when he encounters another passing barbaric group. Eventually a foraging group of Neanderthals near his vicinity and a very simian young woman (Rispoli) undertakes to heal him with herbs. He joins the group and helps them fight off a tribe of savages who's favorite enterprise is beheading their enemies in order to scoop out their brains and eat them raw for food! The young man finally finds another tribe more like his own people and his disgusting odyssey comes mercifully to a close.

This is an Italian cave man movie built along the lines of `Quest for fire' or `Clan of the cave bear'. There is an attempt to paint a realistic picture of prehistoric man, but this movie fails in every way.

There are only a couple of good things i can think of to say about this movie. It has an amusing (and very out of place) goblin style synth score and the opening narration is pretty funny. If the rest of the movie had been as amusing as the opening, it would have been entertaining, but the movie immediately starts going downhill and continues to get worse with each passing second.

There is a little fake looking gore (not much) and many scenes of cave men sitting around grunting at each other as they fight with sticks and brutalize people with pointed rocks. This is one of those bad movies that's not even funny. It's so incredibly boring and slow that it's almost impossible to keep your attention focused on the story. Imagine a movie that shows two hours of somebody washing dishes, with poor lighting and a bad camera angle. This film is only slightly more exciting than that. A total waste of time.

So this is a film about Neanderthals, and perhaps it's an accurate depiction of life for our great ancestors (and perhaps not), but it is annoying to watch. They don't have any language, so communicate using grunts and noises that really got on my nerves.

There's also very little story here, just 1hr 45 mins of showing the struggles of primitive man.

There's a cro magnon man, cannibals, a bear that sounds just like Chewbacca, and I guess I just don't see the point of this movie and it's so boring and pointless, that I really don't know what else to say about it.

Watch Clan of the Cave Bear instead if you are wanting to see a movie about Neanderthals.

Or if you don't care at all about accuracy, One Million Years B. C which at least has dinosaurs which makes it entertaining.

Ultimately, this is kind of boring, whether in comparison to anything else out there, or just unto itself. Conan the Barbarian proves that minimal dialogue is perfectly fine, but intention gets lost within this film's cohesion. Quest for Fire also used no dialogue, which suffers as this does, but is more enjoyable than Master of the World. I am more inclined to believe that Man didn't have an era of cave-dwelling grunters and this is just another avenue for gratuitous art house sex and violence, done as a money grab for the current trends, and to fulfill weird fantasies of barbaric savagery. If you've got time to kill, do with it what you will but don't expect to be entertained. I will say, where I don't find relativity to this, the big-browed lady deserved better.

Excellent. Several timeless, universal contrasting themes regarding humanity, connecting primitive man to today. Any viewer with basic film literary skills to recognize themes, symbolism and allegory will surely notice these, including the ending. The writing and characters are very good and represent these elments well. There are complex characters (3 initial tribe outsiders, 2 tribes) to represent the thematics with diverse human moments, along with unique and artistic direction, editing, sound design.

There are good and bad characters, light and dark, brutality and glimmers of good just like in real life, such a likely reflective of thousands of years ago to today. Many WWII films or modern history with them same or far worse brutality and social collectivism (ie. Nazism, socialist and communist genocides or in dictatorships in recent history, as real true examples) pale in context and carnage and brutality what is rationally shown here for obvious story of primitive man at an early stage.

It is pure fantasy to conjure an image of peaceful tribes without war or vying for power as seen here. You even have characters that fall outside these collectivist groups, which is more than any Hollywood movie today could or would show today (politically or otherwise in writing or with the same craft in direction, editing or original artistically superior soundtrack).

Given the subject matter, genre content, time period, context this film is more extreme and realistic than fantasy or fluff.

If you want Hollywood with Dolby sound, generic soundtrack, clean showered properly groomed media celebrity stars and mindless, theme-less safe entertainment movie, maybe Master of the World might not be for you.

If like a film with synth, ambient original soundtrack, creative artistic choices, editing, bold choices to reflect a gritty dark realism, good cinematography, characters, deeper themes, subject matter and even allegory than this might indeed be for you.

Not a mindless movie but a thought-provoking one requiring some semblance of intelligence at least a hair above that of a primitive.