In 2025, is it really okay to make a film like this?

In the cold opening, we’re following two men on a dark, stormy night. They are soldiers, but ones in a war they can’t quite handle. Their adversary knows no fear and time hasn’t driven them to extinction. As the film’s poster for “Primitive War” suggests, these are creatures that should be fossils and we’re not in Jurassic Park.

The soldiers are either White or African American. The unidentified country is Southeast Asian. People live in thatched huts and wear those straw hats. Reading the synopsis, I learn we are in Vietnam, also cued by the music ( Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son”).

The year is 1968 according to the press release. We’re going to be following the Vulture Squad who are sent by Colonel Amadeus Jericho (Jeremy Piven) to find the Green Berets we were introduced to in the beginning footage.

The Vulture Squad, led by Sergeant First Class Ryan Baker (Ryan Kwanten), specializes in rescuing prisoners of war from the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese. “There was something going on out there, in that valley,” someone concludes. That something is a Russian experiment that brought several specifics of dinosaurs back. The dinosaurs now inhabit the jungles of Vietnam. The dinosaur do not come by way of DNA experimentation but via a particle collider that opened a wormhole through time. Baker learns this from Sophia (Tricia Helfer), a survivor of the Russian experimentation team.

The main problem of the film is that diversity is a Black and White affair. While I have no objections to Black and White balls or black-and-white films, the film’s setting is Southeast Asia. The US was there in support of the Vietnamese in an attempt to prevent the spread of Communism. Even forces like the Green Berets had Vietnamese and local language interpreters. The Green Berets trained and advised South Vietnamese forces. Further, there are problems with the script; after spending some time in Vietnam, one would expect that the soldiers’ language would have some Vietnamese words infiltrating their English.

The film does have one Vietnamese character with a speaking role, played by Ana Thu Nguyen, but she has limited screen time and I wondered: Were Vietnamese women really that comfortable alone with US soldiers considering the My Lai massacre was also in 1968 (March 16). The US Army officer convicted for that, William Calley Jr.,  died last year (28 April 2024).

The lead actors are all White or White-passing (depending upon how you define White).  It’s as if Vietnam didn’t have enough Vietnamese. This is not to say that the actors are bad. Jericho is played by the Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning actor Jeremy Piven who was the titular character of the TV drama series “Mr. Selfridge” which I enjoyed. Yet here the chemistry between the characters and the acting itself is quite flat.

That’s not the only problem. “Fortunate Son” was released in October 1969. It is an anti-war movement anthem and writer John Fogerty has said that “It’s the old saying about rich men making war and poor men having to fight them.” Fogerty did briefly serve in the military in 1967, and was later a reservist, but he was granted an early discharge from the Army Reserve in 1968. The usage of the song doesn’t seem to be an anti-war comment, but evoking an era without much depth. The soundtrack also includes “Run Through the Jungle” which was released in 1970.

The film is based on a 2017 self-published debut novel by US writer Ethan Petus, originally called “Primitive War,” but currently called “Primitive War: Opiate Undertow.”  The filming actually took place on the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia.

Petus with director Luke Sparke wrote the screenplay which has plenty of f-bombs, but the dialogue isn’t clever or really notable. Sparke, according to the press release, made history by being the first Australian director and indie product not have a panel at San Diego Comic-Con. The release also reports that the Ballroom 20 panel was standing room only (Friday, 25 July 2025).What’s most impressive in the film is the dinosaurs. They are wonderfully portrayed despite a more modest budget than any Jurassic Park film. But are dinosaurs enough? Not for me. This is 2025 and any film supposedly set in a country that is not predominately White should have a main character from that country.