Flasz On Film

To be perfectly honest, a movie like Primitive War should never come close to being released theatrically, and especially nowhere near the Christmas-adjacent run-up to the awards season, usually laden with prestige fare, biopics, war dramas and other risk-averse offerings. However, UK distributors decided it was a good idea to release this film as counter-programming to Wicked: For Good and Zootopia 2 (pardon: Zootropolis 2) and only one week after Sisu: Road to Revenge made a brief appearance as well.

Therefore, let’s pretend for a few hot seconds that it is in fact a real film and see what it’s all about. This Australian production was put together for seven million dollars, which was just about enough money to produce the Oscar-winning Nomadland or a piece of indulgent slop like Nine Days. Even twenty years ago, seven big ones would have just about funded the production of Little Miss Sunshine, which is to say that it’s not a whole lot of money to play with and it might be a truly tall order if the movie you’re trying to make is going to have special effects, stunt work, exotic locations, explosions and action. Sure, Godzilla Minus One was made on a tenth of what it took to make Godzilla X Kong, and it is mostly thanks to the fact that Japanese VFX houses cost less to hire than the American ones, but still it was a feat of strength.

I guess, a tip of the hat is in order because I did have the opportunity to leave my house on a Sunday night, go to the cinema and watch a full-blown action movie with CGI dinosaurs, explosions, chases and everything else knowing that catering on a Marvel set would have eclipsed the kind of money these people had to spend while putting Primitive War together. It honestly looks great for what it is.

What it is, however, is the real problem here. Allegedly adapted from a novel, Primitive War is a story set in 1968 during the Vietnam War where we get to follow a team of Green Berets who are sent on some mission deep behind enemy lines and who find themselves under attack… from dinosaurs. That’s right. Dinosaurs. Raptors, T. Rexes, the works. As our heroes are also hunted by Soviet special forces, they come across a lady scientist who tells them that the Ruskies have been up to no good in the Vietnamese jungle, where they built a particle collider—yes, you read it correctly—and somehow opened up a wormhole that brought dinosaurs from extinction.

Consequently, the entire movie adopts the posture of a camp hybrid between Predator and Overlord and banks excessively on genre clichés and immediate memes fettering it to any and all Vietnam war movies and classics like Jurassic Park. I kid you not, the filmmakers thought it was a good idea to needle drop “Fortunate Son” by Creedence Clearwater Revival and play it in the background of a scene involving Huey helicopters flying about, napalm being dropped on enemy positions and American GIs gleefully mowing down their opposition using 50-cal machine guns mounted on the side of their gunships. Also, every time a raptor-looking creature would make an appearance on screen, a flute-based flourish reminiscent of John Williams’s work on Jurassic Park would accompany the image, as though to establish a Pavlovian response.

That is to say—in a roundabout manner—that Primitive War isn’t a great movie. Moreover, it seemingly knows it’s not a great movie as it rips, magpies and borrows from Hollywood staples, plays with genre memes as it forges an unlikely action spectacle that answers the question nobody ever asked, which reads “what if we made a Jurassic Park movie set during Vietnam War?” Or maybe more accurately, what if we took Kong: Skull Island and subbed in dinosaurs for oversized apes and those freaky-looking bipeds that made a bog-standard T. Rex look perfectly proportioned? But—the challenge is that this question must be answered with a movie that cost less than it took Sofia Coppola to make The Bling Ring twelve years ago.

So, coming back to revisit my original astonishment, a movie that wants to look inspired by Kong: Skull Island, Jurassic Park, Predator, Overlord and Apocalypse Now all at once but only has seven million dollars to burn should look just about as good as Sharknado 4: The Fourth Awakens. But it doesn’t. Sure, you can tell in some scenes where rear projection is used and where dinosaur compositing looks questionable, especially during protracted sequences of indulgent Zack Snyder-esque speed ramping—which are most assuredly self-aware without overtly winking at me—but for the most part the production quality can just about pass the muster. What betrays the bargain bin pedigree of Primitive War is elsewhere: in the faces you won’t be able to recognize, line deliveries that feel slightly forced, competent-yet-uninspired scene blocking and writing that lacks the kind of depth of craft you’d expect from major productions.

Which is fine. B-movies are allowed to exist and they definitely need champions, especially when—like this one—they try hard to punch above their weight class. And what truly undermines the camp rompiness this movie would otherwise espouse is that at some point during the production, the filmmakers must have thought that they had an A-movie on their hands instead. That they could imitate a major Hollywood blockbuster and present an alternative from Down Under that could compete on equal terms with, I don’t know, Jurassic World: Rebirth or something. And that’s a mistake.

I think I would have been on board with a disposable action movie filled with CGI dinosaurs, many of which had feathers like prehistoric chickens according to the most recent scientific consensus, where American boys square off against evil Ruskies who ran dodgy pseudoscience in the forest. Sure, sign me up for Overlord: Skull Island. I can take crocacondas in Lake Placid vs Anaconda, shark-filled twisters and other abominations, especially when I don’t have to perform additional mental adaptations and pretend that the movie doesn’t look cheap and shoddy. Primitive War for the most part gets away with its looks alone. But it forgets that a B-movie must never overstay its welcome because there’s only so much time I can spend looking at a movie that could have been written by a child and where the actors who the filmmakers could afford had the kind of range that would make Keanu Reeves look like Marlon Brando in comparison. And Primitive War is quite simply forty-five minutes too long for what it is.

I don’t know—maybe it’s the fault of the book it is based on. But someone should have stepped in and demanded that at least a handful of sequences needed to be taken out in order to give this movie a fair chance. Look, I’d have happily raved to the rafters about this piece of schlock about dinosaurs in Vietnam if it had committed to something more digestible and faster-paced. I was watching Primitive War and somewhere close to two-thirds of the way through the movie I began feeling restless and somehow exhausted because I realized that what was on offer was not a quick in-and-out piece of genre camp, but a bona fide ego-driven attempt at making Sharknado that looks good and hoping it would 100x its production budget.

This isn’t one of those movies. It’s not a hidden gem driven by a killer script and resting on banging special effects. Primitive War has only one of those two. What it does have is enough self-awareness to give the viewer a sense of fun and an excuse to escape their daily woes for a little while. But this contract expires exactly after ninety minutes and it’s just downhill from there.

Thus, while I am super glad to see how far a tiny budget can be stretched and what kind of camp magic can be conjured without the backing of a major big-five Hollywood outfit, I am here to remind those who need to hear it that a blockbuster ego needs to be underpinned by something more. We’ve seen great examples of just that in the past. Think of District 9, a movie that successfully challenged the Hollywood mainstream with its comparatively affordable production. But what it truly rested on was its amazing story and character work. Add to that roster the recent Godzilla Minus One whose magic was in its thematic complexity of what could easily be an Ozu film with a giant lizard in the background. Primitive War wants to join this club, that’s pretty obvious. But it has just about enough horsepower to rival the likes of Overlord and maybe raise the bar for Sharknado-adjacent direct-to-SyFy productions and show everyone how much can be accomplished these days for very little. But asking the viewer to sit tight for nearly two-and-a-half hours of dino-Vietnam is a bit much in exchange for just that.