Editor’s Note: Freeline Media’s movie critic, Mike Fried, has some thoughts on one of his favorite genres, dinosaur movies — the good and not so good. Let’s hear you roar with approval.
By MIKE FRIED
PRIMITIVE WAR
***
I have been waiting to see this since August when it opened via Fathom Events but, unfortunately, not in a theater near me. Was it worth wait?
Sure — I like dinosaur movies.
It’s Vietnam 1968. A green beret unit goes missing. The crazy Colonel Jericho sends a wild-assed recon unit into the jungle to find out what happened to them. And what they find is given away by the movie posters so I can say it — dinosaurs, fucking dinosaurs. And Russians. Pesky Russians collaborating with the Vietcong. But also working on wormholes to drive Russian tanks into the White House lawn but screwing up and connecting with the Jurassic era.
Now, we’re not talking anything to write home about in terms of inventiveness. The dialogue is poor (“This fucking thing will make hydrogen bombs look like Elizabeth lighting one of his farts”; “Well I do have some pretty powerful farts, Sarge!”) and the characters are purely caricatures out of every Vietnam/ Military movie you’ve ever seen.
But what it does have is some better than average production values for a pure B-movie. Filmed on the Gold Coast of Queensland, the settings look like Vietnam. The cinematography works well for this horror film, especially in the couple of scenes where a soldier is being dragged off by a dinosaur.
The only actors I recognized were Jeremy Piven who was obviously brought in for marketability purposes (he’s only in it for about 15 minutes and all he does is yell) and Ryan Kwanten who was good on True Blood but has made crappy movies ever since.
“But Mike,” you say: “How were the dinosaurs?” Well, they cannot compare to Jurassic Park/World. Now having said that, for a movie with $7,000,000 budget the dinosaur effects were pretty impressive. There’s a scene early on when a T-Rex waltzes by the recon team and it looks great, if a little too much rendered and not as natural as its big JW cousin, especially in the daytime scenes. In the nighttime scenes the rendering looks better. The pterodactyls looked like shit, though. But the Tyrannosaurus Rex looks great.
Still, for a cheap-ass movie that has no pretensions about being the next Jurassic World but being rather content in riding on the coattails of the franchise, it’s not half bad. And the dinosaur action scenes were well staged.
If anything, its worst sin is its length. When you have ScarJo, Mahershala Ali and The Lincoln Lawyer, the length can work. But when you have a second rate cast spouting crappy, tedious dialogue, the length of the movie and the film overstepping its welcome become all too apparent.
If you don’t mind this over length and you like your dinosaur action then you should WATCH IT!
The best part of the movie is the inventive closing credits. As of Jan. 1, it is streaming on Kanopy and Hoopla so break out those library cards.
JURASSIC WORLD:REBIRTH
****
It is 2025 — 32 years after dinosaurs were reintroduced to the world. Since they made the world their dominion, many of the dinosaurs have died out around the world, and they mainly live in a tropical band around the equator in an area where humans are not allowed.
Of course, this means that humans for one reason or another will go there because otherwise there is absolutely no movie. And in this story, there’s more than one group of humans — there’s two! First, there’s a family that is sailing across the Atlantic Ocean in a sailboat that gets attacked by a Mosasaurus (the nice big whale-like thing that ate Bryce Dallas Howard’s assistant in Jurassic World).
Next there is a business group — that is to say, a group of mercenaries escorting a doctor and a representative of a drug cartel. It’s hoped that the blood of three dinosaurs that now exist on an island 400 miles away from French Guiana will provide the building blocks for life-saving drugs, which, of course will only be available to the super rich. Mercenaries Zora Bennett and Duncan Kincaid have negotiated 8-figure paydays to help them transport the shady Martin Krebs, the rep for Big Pharma, as well as Dr. Jonathan Loomis, a paleontologist, soon to be out of work because dinosaurs are so five years ago.
And of course, the paths of the two groups converge.
As directed by Gareth Edwards, who gave us arguably one of the best films in the entire Star Wars Canon, Rogue, One, and who also directed 2014‘s Godzilla, this movie is a nice return to the feel of the original film.
The acting is nothing to write home about but, aside from Jeff Goldblum, is it ever? Are you really going to see a Jurassic Park/world movie for the acting???
What really makes this movie work nicely is the script by Jurassic Park veteran David Koepp, who is having a banner year in 2025 after Presence and Black Bag. Not to say that this movie is in the same class as those two movies but rather to say that the producers are using a franchise experienced veteran to push all the right buttons.
And he doesn’t disappoint – from a cold open in an InGen research facility on the Island of Ile Saint-Hubert in the Atlantic, the movie subjects another “poor bastard” (the character Koepp himself played in The Lost World) to a dinosaur, a mutated cross between a velociraptor and a Pteranodon – ugly fucker.
Of course, let’s keep this grounded. We are talking about dinosaurs. The movie is intended to thrill, not to join anyone’s top 10 list. And on that score, the movie works. It starts off slowly with the necessary exposition; as the film proceeds, the action ratchets itself to a tremendous finale with that one ugly, fucking dinosaur again (the full 360 degrees, as Christopher Moltisanti would say). But along the way some fan favorites, such as the Tyrannosaurus Rex and the Raptors and the Stegosaurus, make their appearances to varying degrees.
I fully expect to see this movie again and again and will likely buy it when it comes out on 4K – because I am a dinosaur lover and an action film lover and combine the two and, hell, it’s pure bliss for me.
So, for all you dinosaur lovers out there, I think you’ll get a kick out of this movie, and I think you should WATCH IT!
For all of you people who don’t give a shit about dinosaurs, don’t waste your time. It’s a simple as that – in fact, why are you even reading this review???? Are you dino-curious????
3.5/5 or 4/5, I haven’t decided yet.
If Letterboxd would allow me to rate this 3.75/5 I would but they don’t so tie goes to the runner.
Michael Fried has no formal training in movies, except having watched over 26,000+ movies — if not more — in his 60-plus years on this planet, starting with Goldfinger as his first cinema experience. He knows what he likes and he knows what he doesn’t like, and it’s quite often different from the conventional wisdom. He knows that the best franchise is Godzilla and he loves action movies and comedies. He has not been nominated for any awards except some boring insurance awards which has no applicability to movies (with the possible exceptions of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and John Cassavettes’ Big Trouble). He is part of a team that won the 1980 SUNY Albany Trivia content by correctly guessing the question, “Who played the president of Klopstockia in Million Dollar Legs?” So he has that going for him, which is nice.
Contact Mike at moviemike3@yahoo.com and mike.fried@yahoo.com.
