Crew
Director/Screenplay/Production Design – Luke Sparke, Based on the Novel Primitive War (2017) by Ethan Pettus, Producers – Carmel Imrie, Carly Sparke & Luke Sparke,, Photography – Wade Muller, Music – Frederik Wiedmann, Visual Effects Supervisors – Alex Becconsall & Luke Sparke, Visual Effects – South Pictures (Supervisor – Juan Salgado) & Sparke Effects, Special Effects Supervisor – Brock Wareham, Makeup Effects – Jess Flannigan. Production Company – Sparke Films/Let It Be Entertainment.
Cast
Ryan Kwanten (Sergeant Ryan Baker), Tricia Helfer (Sofia Wagner), Nick Wechsler (Eli Taylor), Jeremy Piven (Colonel Jericho), Anthony Ingruber (Gerald Keyes), Aaron Glenane (Logan Stovall), Carlos Sanson Jr. (Leon Verne), Albert Mwangi (Charlie Miller), Adolphus Waylee (Xavier Wise), Jeremy Lindsay Taylor (General Borodin), M.J. Kokolis (Sergei), Ben Corlett (Nikita), Ana Thu Nguyen (Con Nhen), Ryan Panizza (Tolstoy)
Plot
1968 during the midst of the Vietnam War. Vulture Squad under Sergeant Baker are sent to find what happened to a missing Green Beret platoon. The group arrive in the area and come under attack by fierce animals. In daylight, they realise that they are being attacked by dinosaurs. Baker then encounters Sofia Wagner, an East German scientist. She tells how her late husband helped set up a program for the Soviets that built a collider in the area to create a wormhole. However, this had the unintended effect of transporting dinosaurs from the prehistoric past to the present. Realising the unleashed dinosaurs present a dire threat, Baker and his men set out to shut down the collider.
Primitive War was the seventh film for Australian director Luke Sparke. Sparke had previously made the horror film Red Billabong (2016), the alien invasion film Occupation (2018) and its sequel Occupation: Rainfall (2020), the crime thriller Bring Him to Me (2023), the horror film Devil Beneath (2023) and Scurvy (2024) about a city under attack by monsters.
The film is adapted from Primitive War (2017) by US author Ethan Pettus. This proved to be a success and Pettus expanded on this in several other books. These include the sequel Primitive War II: Animus Infernal (2020), as well as the short story collections The Primitive War Dispatches: The Hunting of Stalker Force (2019) and The Primitive War Dispatches Volume II: The Psalms of Xipetotec (2024). There has also been an illustrated bestiary and a comic-book adaptation.
The concept of Pettus’s novel and the film is essentially “Platoon (1986) meets Jurassic Park (1993)”. Luke Sparke does a serviceable recreation of the era of the Vietnam War movie that Oliver Stone’s Platoon created – men in combat, on manoeuvres through the jungle, the assortment of screw-ups and hardened professionals – and it all shot through with gritty visual style and a good deal of operational double-talk. (My only quibble is the anachronism that comes in the talk of traversable wormholes in 1968 two decades before the idea was put forward in a paper by Kip Thorne in 1988).
The main problem I had in the early scenes was the soundtrack where the loud slams, noises of helicopters and gunfire is run over everything and frequently drowns out or renders the dialogue inaudible. It ended up being easier to watch the film with the subtitles on. Not to mention many of the early scenes are shot at night where it is frequently difficult to see what is happening. These didn’t leave me with a very high expectation of Primitive War. That said, it improves considerably after about the first thirty minutes.
Once we get past the cursory Vietnam War scenario and men on a mission plot, the film brings out the dinosaurs. With the move to daylight, these become very impressive. Primitive War is not quite operating in the same budget arena as the Jurassic Park/World films – indeed, most of the effects are ones that have been supervised by director Luke Sparke with a studio he set up himself. That said, it is a film that punches well above its weight in comparison to the mountain of low-budget Jurassic Park/World copies out there (see Dinosaur Films for listing). Luke Sparke delivers a decent scope of effects that outclass all the competition in this particular subgenre.
The latter two-thirds of Primitive War have some great scenes in the midst of a field with pterodactyls picking off soldiers, a series of ferocious raptor attacks and the like. What makes these stand out is that they are bloody and ferocious – people get killed and Sparke does not soft-pedal the violence the way the Jurassic Park/World films do for family audiences. It is also nice to see the dinosaurs have been designed adhering to more modern speculations about them having feathers, resulting in some striking designs. There’s also a great epilogue, suggestive of an alternative history of sorts, where the dinosaurs spread out all across the region.
Trailer here