The Good

This movie creates a nice mood of impending doom.

The Bad

I just was never grabbed by this story or the effects of Gustave.

Dominic Purcell plays reporter Tim Manfrey in the seen it before Primeval. This film centers around a large crocodile named Gustave that fed off the bodies of people killed during the civil war in South Africa. When one of his stories blows up in Tim's face, he is sent by his boss to cover an attempt to try and catch this beast. Accompanying him to South Africa are his cameraman Steven (Orlando Jones) and a gorgeous reporter named Aviva (Brooke Langton). Things start off bad and get worse pretty quickly. With South Africa being run like a police state, the Americans realize that they can trust no one. Then there's Gustave who only presents himself (like Jaws) in essentially the final third of the movie. Eventually, the battle goes from man against man to man vs. beast, but it seems like its going to take more than a bunch of reporters, a cage and some weaponry to defeat this evil being.

Primeval's biggest shortfall is that there's nothing too special about it. The writing doesn't seem to elevate this movie beyond being a mere genre picture. The effects aren't so good that that can separate it from being like something we'd see on the Sci Fi Channel. So when you break it all down there really isn't too much here.

Features

Croc-umentary: Bringing Gustave to Life

This piece breaks down how Gustave was brought to the big screen. The actors tell the story of Primeval, and then we see how Gustave went through many stages before he finally came to life. The thing is, it isn't like he looks that great in the movie, and it seems like they purposely showed a lot of his bigger action scenes at night so that they could mask the fact that he doesn't look that great. We see animation of the crocodile and apparently the people who created him watched a lot of HD footage of actual crocodiles. Maybe they should have just photoshopped that into this film?

Deleted Scenes

Audio Commentary

Director Michael Katleman and Visual Effects Supervisor Paul Lindon give an insightful look at the making of this movie. They talk about how this film got started in Katleman's kitchen, as he was describing to Lindon how he wanted the crocodile to look on film. They make some jokes as they describe the tireless efforts of everyone on the crew, and it soon became apparent to me that this film took a great deal out of all involved. Katleman discusses shooting out of sequence and then trying to connect the pieces of the movie both while shooting and editing. They also point out that a bunch of scenes were shot in the day and then made to seem like night by adjusting the camera they used.

Video

Widescreen - 2.35:1. Enhanced for 16x9 Televisions. This movie looked pretty sharp on DVD. The biggest problem it has is that it seems to have edited itself into a corner. By that I mean that there are so many quick cuts happening so often (especially during the action scenes), its very difficult to follow what is going on. The best way to describe the look of this film is sunset. There's a lot of yellow and orange colors dominating the screen and there's also a lot of black. As I mentioned, since a lot of the action scenes, both with and with the crocodile, happen at night, this movie sort of looks like a mess at times.

Audio

Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound. Spanish Language Track. French and Spanish Subtitles. The audio on this film was put together to create a constant sense of foreboding with these characters. As much as they may want us to think that they are going after Gustave, in fact, he is actually going after them. They are on his turf and the audio seems to be trying at every interval to make us forget this. They do it through the use of music mainly, but they also try and use an upbeat score so that we won't think that at any moment one of our main characters could be ripped in half. Then when it happens, the music changes as abruptly as the tone of the scene.

Package

There is an embossed cover (that has the same artwork as the amaray cover) that shows us a portion of the crocodile's face as it moves through the grass. The back has some images from the movie (and a really cool drawn image of the croc snapping at someone in midair), a description of what Primeval is about, a Bonus Features listing, Technical Specs and a cast list.

Final Word

Primeval is an interesting film because it is from Hollywood Pictures which essentially makes it a Disney Film. However, it has all the production values of something like DinoCroc, which is a Roger Corman, straight-to-DVD affair that is also distributed by Buena Vista. However I found this whole affair interesting because I know that Primeval had a bigger budget, yet it looks a lot like DinoCroc. Where does this all lead? I can't say that I really know, I just know that Disney's whole "we're not releasing this movie; we are releasing this move; we're gonna promote it two weeks before its release," didn't really seem to do that much for this film in the theatrical marketplace.

At the end of the day, when Dominic Purcell has gone on to be a big star in another movie, I am sure that people will look back at Primeval as one of his early little secrets. While I think that might be over simplifying things, it isn't like this movie is that bad, there just isn't too much about it that's that great.

Primeval was released January 12, 2007.