by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $16.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Ryan Kwanten, Jeremy Piven, Jake Ryan, Jeremy Lindsay Taylor, Lincoln Lewis, Henry Nixon, Aaron Glenane, Tricia Helfer, Ana Thu Nguyen
Intro:
… extremely cool …
Tapping into a similar pulp comic wavelength as Julius Avery’s Overlord, Primitive War brings together Vietnam War action and bigger-than-life dinosaurs in lurid and exhilarating fashion.
The film’s introduction to the recon Vulture Squad feels like any other contemporaneous war flick in its banter and machismo (and requisite ‘Fortunate Son’ needle drop). But once the dinos make their presence known (outside of the particularly chilly cold open), the film shifts from quite familiar into a beast of its own creation.
The shadows are this film’s greatest weapon, combining DP Wade Muller’s tense and claustrophobic camera framing with Luke Sparke’s machete-edged editing to create set pieces where the lack of direct visibility works wonders in ramping up anxiety levels. And even when it steps into the light, the effects are remarkably good.; this legitimately can hold its own against ILM’s work on the Jurassic franchise. Coming from a local independent production, it becomes a T-Rex-sized flex on the Australian industry.
Not that this is director Luke Sparke trying to go full Hollywood. While his work on the Occupation films had proper blockbuster aspirations, they were more a matter of meeting the standard at the halfway point rather than completely jumping the Oceanic ship. American filmmakers tend to over-mythologise the Vietnam War, with many filmic depictions turning into anachronistic power fantasies that play out like collective refusals to admit that it didn’t end well for the Yanks.
Whereas here, Sparke keeps the intensive gore and flashy firefights in context to what is really going on in the story. As the characters push each other further into the fire, and the true origin of these particular dinos is made clear, the film actively avoids any form of nationalistic fervour. This isn’t a story about sides and fighting against a collective enemy, whether that be the Viet Cong, the Soviets, the dinos, or even the U.S. themselves. Instead, it’s about the tragedy of what war turns people into, what that traumatic shift in environment does to sentient life, along with the various damaged coping methods that are employed in the aftermath, from eye candy to mouth candy to vein candy. To paraphrase this film’s ancestral progenitor: their Generals were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should. More than just delivering as both a war film and a dino film, it manages to find thematic riches with the specific overlap between the two, which is rarely the case for this kind of high-concept feature.
Primitive War is a local legend. It lulls its audience into a state of familiarity with its war thrills and prehistoric chills, only to fire off on all cylinders to deliver something that almost-completely refreshes both genres of any trope déjà vu and/or franchise rot. Aside from just being extremely cool to see a local production take such a swing and manage to connect the hit, its wholehearted embracing of its own raw genre-trappings highlights what makes this tier of blockbuster filmmaking so much fun to engage with, while still showing that there’s purpose and meaning behind all the flashbangs and intestine-chewing. Heads up, Hollywood: The South got something to say.
