2025 | rated R | starring Ryan Kwanten, Tricia Helfer, Jeremy Piven | directed by Luke Sparke | 2 hrs 13 mins | 3 1/2 out of 5 |
1968. In the middle of the Vietnam war a colonel (Jeremy Piven) sends a group of soldiers led by Ryan Kwanten (True Blood) into the jungle on a secret mission to recover a lost squad – and encounters dinosaurs.
Primitive War is the Terrifier 3 of 2025. A low budget, B-movie, rough around the edges with questionable writing, questionable acting that absolutely delivers in the areas audiences want to see. In this case, it’s a blatant reaction and rebuke to what Jurassic World has become, perfectly timed, right on the heels of the safest and least creative Jurassic film in history, Rebirth. This movie definitely has its issues, mostly related to the lack of money given to realize this vision and all the corner cutting that has to go with that, but the money is put where it needs to be – the dinosaurs – and it’s a lot of fun when it gets going.
You know Primitive War is a Vietnam movie by the cliche needle drops that pepper the film. You know Fortunate Son is in this. It’s not a Vietnam movie without it. Time Has Come Today, Summer Lovin’, Run through the Jungle – they’re all here as helicopters fly over the tree-line and soldiers walk through dinosaur-inhabited jungles. So there are a lot of tropes here, but the exchange is a movie that gives us something the studio movies haven’t in decades – a violent R-rated dinosaur movie that makes the dinosaurs monsters again. They bite off heads, rip out guts, and in the creepiest moment, a raptor puts its claws over an eviscerated man’s mouth so the rest of the soldiers don’t hear him scream. Equally, these soldiers have no moral trouble emptying machine gun fire into an army of raptors and a couple of T-rexes.
Where these things came from is a fun reveal, accompanied with an entry into the movie of sci-fi mainstay Tricia Helfer delivering an appropriately goofy Russian accent. Not only are we not coddling dinosaurs in this movie but we’re up against commie villains as well. This along with the Sisu sequel are like a double-shot of water in the desert even if the movie doesn’t ultimately do a ton with it. It’s over 2 hour running time is astonishing, but it doesn’t feel sluggish at at any point, dolling out weird sights and information at regular intervals to keep it all moving at a crisp pace. Despite its tropes and low budget, Primitive War is objectively more well-structured than the 3 fetch quests that make up Jurassic World: Rebirth and, yes, it is a tighter and more efficient script. Money, special effects and star power don’t mean anything if your genre movie isn’t fun.
You definitely see the rough edges around all the non-dinosaur scenes, my favorite cost-cutting moment is when a character pulls the usual stay-behind-and-sacrifice-himself routine and instead of seeing the explosion, his heroic sacrifice is left off camera: the movie just flashes a light against the next scene and moves on. I’ve always said that Jurassic Park was lightening in a bottle that never should have been franchised. Much less into 6 sequels. The result, particularly with the Jurassic World films, was a series that took Michael Crichton’s brilliant ideas for bringing dinosaurs back to life and turned them into generic monster movies, while still treating them like an endangered species we should sympathize with. It defanged dinosaurs as genre monsters while monopolizing the subgenre for movie goers. For the last 20 years dinosaur movies have had to be Jurassic World or nothing.
Primitive War is the imperfect movie that breaks that monopoly. I can honestly say I’ve never seen images that are in this movie. Not just the juxtaposition of dinosaurs with Vietnam tropes but the film’s super-charged, rain-soaked climax where wave after wave of velociraptors charge into military gunfire (in slow motion!). It’s super cheesy but that’s what B-movies are. This one gets there with gusto.