Primitive War

• Directed by Luke Sparke
• August 11, 2025 (Sydney) / August 21, 2025 (Australia)
• Based on the 2017 novel Primitive War by Ethan Pettus

In Vietnam during 1968 a US Army Recon unit carrying out a rescue mission are attacked by dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs in Vietnam? I’m down. In broad strokes the concept of Primitive War reminds me of any number of movies where dinosaurs interacted with modern men. I went into this very excited hoping for something fun and different in today’s relatively unimaginative film landscape. While it could be fun it was not exactly a breath of fresh air.

My first concern was it looked a little too clean and modern. Filming on digital over film stock takes away from any era even if digital does make special effects easier. There are moments of obvious CGI used to add more people, change the background, and the obvious addition of CGI dinos. That and the people look like they just stepped out of the present. It doesn’t help that Jeremy Piven has a very noticeable die job for his beard and facial hair. Where do you get Just for Men in the jungles of ‘Nam in ‘68?!

This is a little over two hours, and it can feel a little slow. I am a big proponent of keeping things to the point. Some conversations could have been shortened or even eliminated completely. Truthfully Primitive War needed fewer characters. This is based off a book and I have no idea how many of the characters are from that, but a book has a lot more time that it can give to major and minor characters in comparison to a movie.

Between the casting and occasional dodgy effects, this has the vibe of a Syfy Channel film. When you have names like Trisha Helfer and Jeremy Piven as your two biggest celebrities, it further gets into that feeling. No smack necessarily on either but Helfer is closely associated with the network due to Galactica and Piven’s career has seen better days.

I’ve seen some stuff with Jeremy Piven in it and he is a good actor. He is just miscast in the part of Colonel Amadeus Jericho. He should’ve been one of the slimy government agents rather than the cigar chopping soldier. That’s where his skills are. Trisha Helfer is a good actress, but her accent for the role of Sofia Wagner is far too thick and Russian despite the character stating she was born in East Berlin.

Speaking of Tricia Helfer, her character of Wagner is stuck in an outpost after the people she is with all get killed by the local dinosaur population. Passing time for her has been accomplished by getting high on morphine because there is nothing else to do. That seems like a heck of a jump. Not sure if she had a substance abuse problem beforehand but it would not surprise me. Without something to reveal such an issue it just makes it illogical.

This movie takes time out for the characters to regret Vietnam and die in moments where they are trying to make up for it or ones that strongly feel like an apology death for America’s presence. Why? You are in Vietnam fighting dinosaurs! That is all you really need. If you can figure out how to make fighting dinosaurs parallel the pointlessness of the conflict, then go right ahead. Otherwise keep them killing dinosaurs.

All this takes place in a valley. Is this some type of hidden prehistoric world like in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World? No. Turns out it is a Russian experiment to create wormholes to send troops behind enemy lines with the idea of perhaps landing them on the White House lawn. That may have been from the book but did not work in how it was presented. Writing it made me a snicker a little bit. At this point it feels like it came straight out of some bad 80s movie. Maybe because this revelation was not hinted at. Sometimes you need to prep the audience before the truth comes out.

Just before that moment General Grigory Borodin (Jeremy Lindsay Taylor) is introduced as the true big bad of the story. The plan for a mass transit device became a time machine because he cut corners and he just does not care. Great villain material but putting him in so late was a letdown. The final battle never felt inevitable, and he never became somebody that MUST be defeated.

If it were not for the notes I took I think I would struggle to recall the movie. There is nothing the sticks out. No particularly engaging characters and no strong beats. A sniper named Logan Stovall (Aaron Glenane) hears voices. Certainly could have been very interesting but it matters little. I recall him but mostly because he was a missed opportunity.

It does get some things right. There are sequences with a nice level of gore. Plenty of explosions and some good amounts of gross such as the giant pterosaur that slurps the guy’s intestines like spaghetti. The moments of awe that SHOULD accompany the appearance of dinosaurs in a movie are here a few times. Explosives are a logical answer to a time travel device. The twist here is that they understand exploding the device could cause explosions across space and time so they need to destroy the generator.

I like the action and some of the dinosaur moments, but there are too many characters, and the story of Primitive War went on a little too long. It’s fun but forgettable.