Years ago, there were reports of an unused Jurassic Park sequel script by indie legend John Sayles that took the series in a strange direction involving dino-soldiers.
There are hints of this pitch in the end stretch of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, when dinos are brought to the mainland with the hopes of auctioning them off for use as weapons. But mostly the Jurassic World movies have circled back to isolated islands, as in the recent summer hit Jurassic World Rebirth.
The filmmakers behind Primitive War, a new action movie released by Fathom Events August 21, essentially ask if Jurassic is done with that dino-soldier mash-up idea, and if so, could they borrow it?
Well, sort of. None of the dinos in Primitive War are armed with anything but their natural weapons: claws, teeth, cunning, and so on. But in an irresistibly silly inspiration played admirably (mostly) straight, these creatures are pitted against a group of soldiers in Vietnam in 1968.
Colonel Jericho (Jeremy Piven) sends a tough-guy platoon called Vulture Squad to investigate the disappearance of a group of Green Berets. Ryan Baker (Ryan Kwanten) and his men quickly discover a jungle full of dinosaurs—somehow, a whole Jurassic Park’s worth, as engineered by a misguided Russian science project.
They learn the details from Sofia (Tricia Helfer from the Battlestar Galactica remake series, overacting up a storm), a Russian who eventually—emphasis on eventually; this movie runs 132 overconfident minutes—convinces the team to take down the dino facility once and for all to avert an apocalypse. They do not seem difficult to convince of anything: “Lady knows her stuff,” one of the grunts says admiringly after she reports seeing six raptors in the wild. She’s good at counting, all right.
Primitive War has the opportunity to do a lot of stuff that the PG-13 Jurassic movies cannot. It features R-rated gore, for one thing, and is far less cautious about which characters are allowed to be torn apart by prehistoric beasts, allowing the standard faux-Spielbergian wonder to be ripped up alongside them.
It also has plenty of leeway as a Vietnam War movie. Normally a 2025 movie set in 1968 immediately busting out “Fortunate Son” on the soundtrack would be laughable. This movie’s shorthand cheesiness practically demands it, and “Run Through the Jungle” besides. (Don’t worry, it duly overkills its Creedence clearances.)
But corners have to be cut somewhere; Primitive War’s budget is obviously not Jurassic-sized. (Its Fathom Events debut feels like a tell that this was designed primarily as a streaming attraction.) Director and co-writer Luke Sparke (adapting a novel alongside author Ethan Pettus) come up with some effective strategies for disguising both the sometime jankiness of the dinosaur effects and the shallowness of the movie’s sets.
Most noticeably, night scenes are backlit to create deep-black shadows in the foreground, which at first creates striking contrast. With time, it looks like a bunch of eyeballs and creature shapes dancing in the dark, making single-trait characters even more difficult to discern. The big climax features rainless lightning that looks suspiciously like a strobe light.
To be clear, there are plenty of daylight monster shots too, and some of the mayhem is fun enough. A pair of budget T. rexes do look surprisingly cool in that fake lightning storm, tearing apart the Russian base. That extended final sequence has a gonzo energy that the rest of the movie harnesses in only the shortest of bursts. Some earlier dinosaur sequences pass by in montage, as if shots composed for a sizzle reel were incorporated into the movie itself because, hey, waste not, want not.
But boy, does this story not earn its war-movie griminess or its serious-movie runtime.
In the grand tradition of the name-brand Jurassic Park movies, Primitive War’s Vietnam setting is mostly used to provide a generically familiar jungle habitat for its creatures. When it deviates from that, it also strays from the idea of Dinos in Nam; those Creedence needle-drops are the only real point where it feels like the movie is engaging with Vietnam movie tropes, let alone imagery or ideas about the war. Most of the soldiers talk with the overwritten colorful vulgarity of modern genre screenwriter vernacular, and the last-minute attempt to provide some world-building wonder feels pretty cheap.
As much as some fans might yearn for a more adventurous, eclectic take on the Jurassic Park/World material, Primitive War winds up offering the bizarre assurance that just making a dinosaur-centric B-movie is probably a lot harder than it looks.
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