One Big Thing Sets Primitive War's Dinosaurs Apart From The Ones In Jurassic Park
by Ryan Scott · /Film"Jurassic Park" is pretty much the undisputed greatest dinosaur movie of all time. It spawned a massive franchise that currently consists of seven movies and, in all likelihood, will soon gain an eighth after the success of this summer's "Jurassic World Rebirth." But one thing that the "Jurassic" movies largely haven't had, despite almost having a monopoly on the genre, is scientifically accurate dinosaurs. That's what helps director Luke Sparke's "Primitive War" stand out.
Based on Ethan Pettus' novel of the same name, "Primitive War" arrived in select theaters over the summer and soon won over audiences. Despite having a fairly limited budget, Sparke managed to cram this movie full of dinosaurs, many of which look very different from the ones we've seen in the "Jurassic" films. There's a good reason for that.
"It was definitely something I kept saying on set. I kept saying that to people throughout the production, as we want to make sure that, you know, these dinosaurs aren't cloned," Sparke said in a 2024 interview with Kaiju United. Without getting into spoilers, the film doesn't feature dinosaurs recreated by humans. They're the genuine article. As such, Sparke had to try as hard as he could to make them accurate. The director continued:
"The sci-fi factor of this movie, and the book, is that these animals have been transported from the Cretaceous Period, right? There's been this weird science experiment that has brought these creatures to our time, to the jungles of Vietnam. They're supposed to just have been walking through."
The movie takes place during the Vietnam War in 1968 and centers on a recon unit that's been sent to an isolated valley deep in the jungle to find a missing platoon. They quickly discover they're not alone, though. Inexplicably, there are dinosaurs all over this place. Again, not to spoil it for people who haven't seen the movie, but the explanation for the dinosaurs is, in a word, outlandish.
Jurassic Park and Primitive War have very different dinosaurs, for good reason
Steven Spielberg's "Jurassic Park" was released in 1993 and features very inaccurate dinosaurs. The field of paleontology has evolved a great deal since then to reveal that certain dinosaurs, including raptors, had feathers, among other things. But it's worth recalling that "Jurassic Park" also focuses on dinosaurs who were brought back to life using cobbled together DNA. In the "Jurassic World" movies, Dr. Henry Wu (BD Wong) even addresses that the franchise's dinos have never been accurate in terms of what they would've been like 65 million years ago.
"The caveat to that is when 'Jurassic Park' came out, that was kind of like the most up to date science at the time," Spark said in the same interview. "They had the T-Rex in the right position with the tail when previously it was dragging on the ground from the 1930s through the 1980s."
The science behind animals that have been extinct for millions of years is a moving target. 2022's "Jurassic World Dominion" did feature a prologue with more scientifically accurate dinos, but beyond that, the franchise has been content to exist on its own terms. Sparke, speaking further, explained that he and his collaborators tried as hard as they could to make "Primitive War" as accurate as possible:
"I wanted to make it as accurate as I could, given what we know now. I spoke to Ethan, and in the book, the T-Rex has feathers. I know at the time there was a conversation about that, and then I think now the scientific community thinks that T-Rex probably didn't have feathers, like its portrayal in 'Prehistoric Planet.' I had to make these choices, and as a director and filmmaker, you have to make a million choices a day — little micro decisions — that all end up adding to the sum of the whole."