Parents' Guide to Primitive War

It might have been a great five-second elevator pitch—"soldiers vs. dinosaurs in Vietnam"—but this bloody sci-fi-war movie goes on far too long and takes itself far too seriously to be much fun. Before it even gets to the dinosaurs, Primitive War spends a full half-hour following the seven Vultures on a different mission. Presumably it's an effort to get to know them a little, but that effort fails. In the movie's maelstrom of noise and mud, it's hard to tell who's who. When they do finally reach the dinosaur section of the jungle, things get a little clearer, and the movie starts to become fun. Because of the darkness and thickness of the vegetation—and thanks to the intermittent flashing of gunfire—the dinosaur attacks are impressive, and the effects don't seem half-bad.

But as things move to broad daylight, the seams start to show. Primitive War spends time giving its characters little personality attributes—one man hears voices in his head, another likes to drink, a third is the happy-go-lucky type, a fourth believes in God, etc.—but they still emerge as more of a checklist than three-dimensional figures. And when the group encounters Sophia, the melodrama ramps up to an annoying degree, with lots of emoting, shouting, and overacting. Perhaps worst of all is that the dinosaurs get short shrift; there's nothing interesting about them. They just rampage. They could have been just about any kind of monster, and little about the movie would have changed. Once upon a time, there was a low-budget movie called The Valley of Gwangi, in which cowboys faced off against stop-motion dinosaurs, and it was a hoot. It knew just what it was doing. Primitive War, on the other hand, is a "dino-bore."