Streaming Movie Review: Primeval (2007)
Posted by
fitz in Movies on Nov 02If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Hi all…
Here’s the recipe for Primeval… Take the ethnic cleansing insanity of Darfour, add a press crew and a giant crocodile, mix well.
Image via Wikipedia
And funny enough, it wasn’t bad. It wasn’t the most original monster movie I’ve seen, but it had a good number of startles, some great one liners, and an interesting political message.
Rating: 
The story starts with the death of a forensic anthropologist unearthing mass graves in Burundi. When she moves from one mass grave to what she thinks is another, she stumbles onto a sleeping monster, Gustave - the giant crocodile.
From there, the American press sends a group to Africa to find and capture Gustave. Tim (Dominic Purcell) is a news producer told by his boss to go with his cameraman, Steven (Orlando Jones), with a reporter Aviva (Brooke Langton). They head to Africa to find Gustave. Unfortunately, he lives in the water near a constested border.
In Africa, they meet Crocodile-hunter-ish Matt Collins (Gideon Emery) and their guide Jacob Krieg (Jurgen Prochnow). Hilarity ensues as they track down the monster, make new friends, and get embroiled in a political mess with a local warlord.
Actor-wise, this wasn’t bad either. Orlando Jones had a great mix of both serious lines and funny ones. Dominic Purcell was his typical sarcastic/macho self. Brooke Langton was the emotional heart of the film, who turned tough when she needed to. And Jurgen Prochnow showed that he can still be a badass in his 60s!
The big crocodile was actually quite decent as far as special-effects go. I think there were some issues with perspective (it looked really huge in the water, but when chasing Orlando Jones towards the end of the film, it shrunk a bit). Maybe that was deliberate, and maybe it wasn’t.
All things being unequal, I have to admit I enjoyed the movie. Orlando Jones had all the great lines and the monster was somewhat believable, which is strange in a monster movie.
I’ll give this 2.5 out of 4. It was fun for a modern monster movie!
–Fitz
p.s. Pick up this movie at Amazon:
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=3d14ab5c-0a34-4399-9965-b4e3c8c1858d)
| 3.2 |
November 4th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
With some monster movies, some directors try to pay an homage to early monster films where the perspective was off because of technology at the time, or plain poor production values. With things so high tech these days, an homage comes off in a modern film as an error and not a “oh look, they are parodozing”. For example, the Godzilla remake where the foot was big as a city block, and then just big as a bus. I am betting that the size mistake is a mistake and not deliberate.
November 4th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
@VintageGent Definitely could’ve been a simple error. Just odd with the cost of CGI effects these days that you’d have that kind of a disparity. Thanks for commenting!
November 5th, 2008 at 11:22 pm
Yeah, with all the planning, storyboards, etc and a bazillion bucks…how could they have missed that?