Primitive War (2025)
This ain’t no walk in the park.
Tonight is another one on the list I haven’t gotten to yet. The concept sold me on the movie more than anything else, and to be fair in setting expectations, mine were pretty low for this movie going in. i'm also suffering a bit of arm pain so we're going to try something new tonight and try some voice dictation software to see if the review can be typed out by voice instead of my usual hand typing. In turn, I do apologize if anything is, you know, a little wonky, but I can always try and go through and touch things up afterwards as I reread it. I just would like to, you know, help myself out a little bit. It's almost the opposite of what we're watching tonight. But hey, with all this advanced technology, let's go ahead and start ourselves a nice watch of Primitive War.
The plot here is relatively simple. I mean, some of the sci-fi elements are maybe a little less simple, but it is what it is. Our main gist is basically going to be Vietnam War, except with dinosaurs. We follow a squad known as the Vulture Squad. A nice little Recon outfit out there saving people from prisoner camps. When they get back to base they get a new mission. Seems a couple of Berets have gone missing and they need to go and find them. There's more to it though, how much more? Couldn't tell you that's classified. Don't really want to elaborate on any given facts for the movie, just say it's classified. Easy peasy. Anyways, the crew gets sent out there to track down those berets and guess what? They run into dinosaurs and everything goes nuts. Will anybody in the team survive? How many different dinosaurs will we get? Why are there dinosaurs in the middle of the Vietnamese jungle in the first place? These questions and more at 4:00.
Now if you heard that plot pitch and you, like me when I heard the original pitch of the story for the movie, think this sounds a lot like a SyFy original movie you're not alone. In turn my expectations were pretty tempered. Acting here isn't horrible but it could be better. I don't necessarily blame the actors themselves as much as what's written and what they have to work with here though. Perfect example of this is some of the dialogue - or in some few moments monologues - are kind of lame. Maybe not lames not the right word, perhaps we can go with “not great” instead. It facilitates what's going on but it also doesn't really do much towards making anybody in particular have any real standout moments either. I don't really necessarily feel like the actors are the ones doing a horrible job here. I mean there are times when it's kind of nice - it just never really feels like it gets really nailed out of the park is all.
Characters you could say fare a lot worse considering that there's not really much to any of them. They do have a mix of people in it, but for the most part the soldier types are soldier types the entire movie. Sort of emanates this trying to emulate machismo filled Vietnam War movie vibe. Some of the characters do get more to play with than others, like little bits of background drop for them, but I would definitely not say anybody in here really has what I would think of as an arc from a standard movie. It's very much not worried about being a drama or a character piece or a character study, or really anything more elaborate than a slasher movie if I'm being fair and honest. It's enough to get you through the movie but it's not really going to give you much of a reason to root for any given character over another one. Some of them will be more annoying, and some of them will have moments where you're like yeah that's a cool character, but it's nothing that's going to really blow you out of the water and stick with you for the rest of your time. In fairness I don't really think that's what the movie was aiming for so no harm no foul?
A band of vultures.
Now more so than story or characters or actors the main draw here for most people is probably going to be the combination of dinosaurs and war, although for the most part it never really specifically plays out like a full scale war. It does have a lot of elements of Vietnam War era to it - what I mean by this could be multiple things like when we get to the sound department there will be a specific call out later, but also the general combat tends to be a lot of hidden things back and forth guerrilla tactics kind of stuff. Human to human engagements are relatively limited to the front and end and a little bit in the middle, outside of that it's almost entirely people versus dinosaurs. It's kind of showing SyFi grade movie nature at this point when we get to these conflicts - not necessarily in the dinosaurs, because the dinosaurs do look relatively decent but more so you'll notice some really bad sight lines and things lining up on screen as to what's actually supposed to be going on.
While some of the action seems like it might be trying to hide things from you, the actual effects themselves really aren't bad. Most of the dinosaurs look pretty good. It might not be original Jurassic Park kind of good, but considering I went in thinking it was probably some kind of a indie dinosaur movie set in Vietnam, it's looked a lot better than some of the other dinosaur movies I've seen, especially direct to TV ones. There's also a nice variety of dinosaurs here, and they work in a bit of the modern aesthetic as well, with having things like the velociraptors and little Raptors having feathers on them. Heck, even the T Rex technically has some feathers on it, it's just mostly sticking to the tried and true leathery giant lizard king look. There's also some flying ones and herbivore ones. It's a lot more different dinosaurs than you would have thought. On top of this, the effects that work around the dinosaurs, like them interacting with things, are also surprisingly good. But more so than with the dinosaurs, I feel like not all of those effects are as passable. Maybe it's just because I'm looking more at it when I'm seeing things like water ripples and stuff like that, who knows. Most of the people and war effects are also pretty good, and the movie does get pretty violent, so not all scenes really are something that people will necessarily love if they're not into the violent stuff. I mean, there's dinosaurs that disembowel people at times, so you're going to get a little bit of guts and stuff. Probably not as frequent I feel like as you would in a zombie movie, but quality wise kind of on par with such.
Audio is balanced pretty decent. As alluded to earlier on, they do have a penchant for putting every song that you might expect to play on a Vietnam based helicopter into the movie, so they at least have a little bit of spending money for the audio department. Most of the lines are delivered fine. Uh, maybe a little bit over the top but audio wise fine. Most of the dinosaurs also sound fine. It's nothing quite as punchy as perhaps hearing Godzilla roar, but there is something to the warble of the velociraptors in particular that I really particularly enjoyed hearing. On the flip side of this, there's also the I'm a T Rex and I took a bite at you and caught nothing but air with my bite. Weird cork pop sound that I imagine is supposed to be emulating its teeth and mouth just clapping together with nothing but air. And in that sense, it sort of makes logical sense to me that it might sound like that, But every time I heard it, I started to laugh. No offense, movie. It's just a really funny noise to hear in that situation. For the thinking folks.,I mean, I guess there might be some stuff here. I really wouldn't spend too long trying to think of it though. You can angle the whole classified need to know higher ups not telling people things that they should know and it causing issues being a thing. You could pull science experiments doing things that they necessarily shouldn't be doing because they can do them. You could maybe talk about the good and bad of war and casualties and all that kind of stuff. Honestly though, I'm here watching a bunch of dinosaurs attack a bunch of soldiers and sometimes getting killed by bullets and sometimes not getting killed by bullets, seemingly at random, much like a lot of the eye lines in the action scenes. I'm just saying I wouldn't think too hard about it if I was you watching this movie.
A much angrier band of vultures.
To bring it all home it's not a bad movie. It has its fun moments, it has its fun lines, and overall it was a lot better of a movie than I really expected going in. Before I actually started watching it I figured it was going to be one of those science fiction style movies where it's like “ha ha cool” and borderline annoying but there's dinosaurs in it and it's kind of cool because of that. What I actually ended up getting though was a dinosaur movie set in Vietnam that has better effects work than the standard made for TV movie, but the story is kind of on par with one. It's not bad but it's not super great either. It would probably make for a great movie to just throw on with a bunch of friends and have a good time watching it, especially if those friends are prone to enjoying macho movies. In a way it sort of plays out a lot like the original Predator movie, just with dinosaurs and honestly it's kind of a bit longer as well. The movie is a good slightly over 2 hours long, and although for the most part I was having a good time throughout there was a point in the last half hour to hour range that I really just kind of felt like it might be dragging a little bit - like we could really get on with it. For the most part though, if you're looking for a bunch of dinosaurs attacking a bunch of soldiers and you're not worried about everything being pristine and lining up like it has a billion dollar budget it can be a fun time. I have definitely seen worse movies involving dinosaurs and people with guns.