Since no one seems to want to remember the scrappy days of the Roger Corman produced Carnosaur, the realms of the dinosaur movie has mostly remained firmly clenched in the PG-13 claws of the Jurassic World franchise. But while such a monopoly on prehistoric creatures have delivered many an iconic demise, there are some out there who think that the off-screen deaths and bloodless chompings could push the boundaries a bit more and give us that R rated, dino bloodbath our inner twelve year old demands.
Leave it the Australians to pick up that decidedly unsubtle baton and run with it with Primitive War, a low budget actioner that heaves a whole bunch of other movies into a blender and does what it can with whatever mishmash pours out. We get dinosaurs, sure – but we get them during the backdrop of the Vietnam War as a bunch of soldiers find themselves tumbling down the food chain when a rescue mission suddenly turns into kind of deranged fight for survival you’d come up with as a child while smashing mismatched action figures together.
It’s 1968 and the Vietnam War is still raging on – but on the midst of a stinking, sweltering jungle, a team of Green Berets have discovered that there’s things far more dangerous than Charlie lurking out in the undergrowth and promptly go “missing”. As a result, shouty commander, Colonal Jericho, instructs a Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol dubbed Vulture Squad to swoop in to search and evacuate any survivors and before you can say “wait, isn’t this Predator?” the seven men have discovered that they’re in the real shit now.
Lead by the upstanding Baker and containing virtually every cliche character from a ‘Nam movie you’ve ever seen, Vulture Squad quickly surmises that this isn’t your typical search and rescue mission when they’re set upon by a pack of flesh eating Deinonychus that cause the team to get split up. While Baker and rookie radio operator, Verne, have their own problems when they inadvertently disturb a nest of a slumbering family of Tyrannosaurus, the rest of the squad find themselves being hunted by a Soviet team called the Dogs Of War which, alongside the presence of actual fucking dinosaurs, raises some obvious, and quite vital questions.
Answers arise in the form of junkie, Russian paleontologist, Sofia Wagner, who not only helps Baker and Verne by offering them shelter from large, hungry lizards, but gives them an explanation of sorts that involves secret Russian experiments, particle colliders and malfunctioning wormholes that, if left unchecked, could spell disaster for the planet.
Realising that that their “simple” rescue mission has now become a struggle to save the world, a united Vulture Squad has to fend of various killer lizards and trigger happy Russians in order to save the world from a toothy fate.
You have to admire whatever epic bong hit caused someone in the Aussie filmmaking comunity to simply throw Jurassic Park, Predator and Kong: Skull Island together in a big pot just as an excuse to make a monster movie mash up with the title of a bad, 1990s video game; and yet, while Primitive War struggles to overcome its very obvious influences, it proves to be something of a surprisingly decent actioner. When presented with the idea of such a pulpy concept, there’s certain places your brain goes when envisioning what such a movie looks like, and for better or worse, Luke Sparke’s overachieving epic somehow manages to cover virtually all of them. There’s the typical cluster of American troops who fit all the stereotypes you usually get in these types of movies – focused leader, uncertain rookie, charismatic joker, traumatised sniper – who all roll the dice to see which order they die in, if they even die at all. No one here has a personality that goes much beyond their thinly sketched profiles and various sob stories, but the movie at least tries to something with them by giving various scenes of dialogue that goes a little beyond the usual, tough-guy banter. However, it only succeeds in ballooning the runtime to a surprisingly bloated 133 minutes when a nippy, zippy 100 would have fitted the film perfectly.
Of course, we’re all really here for the unrestrained dinosaur action and while some claims of a Jurassic World beater are slightly exaggerated, at its very finest, Primitive War certainly manages to shine a more ferocious light on cinematic dino-maulings. Bodies are slashed, heads are gnawed and during one stand out moment, a gang of Quetzalcoatlus tongue the intestines right out of a screaming man’s torso – but while the gore content is more in line with the type of stuff you’d get in the Dino Crisis video game (think Resident Evil with saurians and you’re 100% there), there’s not quite the directorial agility to come up with anything that rivals JP’s original Rex attack, or the kitchen scene, or the climax to Jurassic World or, most of the franchise’s bigger budgeted set pieces, to be honest. However, while it can’t match the complex cat and mouse stuff that a chunkier budget can afford, Sparke does manage to concoct some genuinely kickass imagery, especially in its go-for-broke finale that sees hordes of screeching, feathered, Raptors racing through rain, fire and bullets to try and tear our heroes to bits while they attempt to escape on helicopters. Elsewhere, the Rex chase is also of endearingly high quality and if some of the CGI ultimately slips to the level of the 1999 BBC documentary, Walking With Dinosaurs, it’s hardly the end of the world and the feathers really are a nice touch.
However, once again we have another movie packed with recycled ideas that totter dangerously between cheeky homage and utter rip-off. The dinosaur stuff is a given of course and it’s instantly forgivable as you can no more make a dinosaur movie wothout referencing Jurassic Park than you can a shark movie without referencing Jaws. Even the incredibly Predatoresque set-up (gifted rescue team callously misled about a mission to save Green Berets) is somewhat understandable as it gives the film a nice shorthand about how to get its characters there in the first place – but Primitive War immediately starts to lose some of that innovation when you realise that it really is just a Kong-less Skull Island that already had played that ingenious Vietnam angle back in 2017. Hell, it even goes through all the same songs that pop up on the soundtrack of every ‘Nam movie ever made. Not even Ryan Kwanten’s steely gaze, Tricia Helfer’s cracking Russian acting and some typical overacting by Jeremy Piven manage to help the more full-blooded dinosaur attacks gain the traction in needs to climb the direct to streaming rip-off hill the movie is furiously attempting to climb.
“Too long” and “too derivative” are complaints that hound movies like this all the time, and I genuinely wish that Primitive War had that extra something to stop it feeling so disposable. However, the dinosaur shit is undeniably strong and the sight of soldiers casually marching in the shadow of gargantuan thunder lizards is worth the price of a rental alone, even if originality is all but extinct.
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