Rating:

“The jungle doesn’t just have eyes, son. It has teeth.”

Author: Ethan Pettus

One of my earliest memories is sitting in a boxy 80s car in the rain at a drive-in-theater in Memphis, TN, watching the T-Rex break free from its enclosure to wreak some dino havoc on Hammond’s new, spared-no-expense theme park. As a little girl, that movie stuck with me, and I disappointed my poor mother by ignoring her carefully saved and cherished Barbie collection to demand toy dinosaurs instead. My childhood room was full of them, the velociraptor and T-Rex being my personal favorites. As an adult, I’m still living in the afterglow of Rebirth and having made my friend, who had never seen a Jurassic Park movie, sit through all six of them before taking her to the theater to see Rebirth in person.

I say all this to give you context. I’m a woman in her late 30s with an unabashed dinosaur obsession. The toilet paper holder in my bathroom is even a T-Rex. When I saw Primitive War, I dropped everything and got the audio book. Dinosaurs in dense jungles chasing soldiers? Yes please!

But Primitive War isn’t about dinosaurs; they don’t even really fit. It’s a story about the Vietnam war, with four hundred plus pages focusing on navel-gazing Rambo types who commit war crimes, drink, and get depressed. They lament the horrors of war while committing the horrors of war. The story covers every PTSD war-hero stereotype available. They’re tough, alcoholic, and sensitive. They will fuck you up, but they will secretly pour a drink out for you later, while staring off into the rain drenched jungle and contemplating the cyclical nature of man’s inhumanity to man. Then, a dinosaur will appear and eat a few of them.

Yes, sadly, that’s the book. Now, the dinosaur action, while it does not fit at all, is still very well done. We get a Quetzalcoatlus that is far more terrifying than anything Jurassic Park thought up and way more brutal than the nearly endless pterodactyl death scene in Jurassic World. We get the obligatory T-Rex (yay!) and some Utahraptor’s (with their eerily glowing night eyes). When the dinosaurs came in for some carnage, I perked up, entranced by the more accurate descriptions of feathered death machines. Oddly indomitable death machines which can take on modern weaponry . . . but ok.

Image by Firenzos from Pixabay

The problem is when the dinosaurs aren’t let out to play, this book is a boring slog. I couldn’t name any of the 20+ characters now. We have our American characters, including the tough hick with a Confederate flag bandana (eye role), the alcoholic, the religious one, the commander doing-the-right-thing-dammit, and the great white hunter dude who spouts Yoda-like wisdom when not killing something. Then, we have some jingoistic Russians who care more about Mother Russian than their own skins, and we have a few Viet-Cong, who are mostly non-entities. We have an evil general with his own schemes, and an evil scientist with an unlikely, left-field dino explanation, which sort of ties into the war. It’s Rambo on the late, late show, complete with Dr. Frankenstein as his cohort. It’s dumb.

It’s impossible to keep the characters separate, and despite desperate attempts to humanize them, they’re all versions of the same old war movie stereotypes. Nothing new here, nothing especially touching, and no one to root for (other than the dinos, of course).

And for a book that has a T-Rex on the cover, don’t expect a lot of dino action either. What there is good, gory, brutal, and imaginative, although we don’t care about the people in those scenes, so it takes the tension out. But everything else is militaristic naval gazing. No wonder the characters drink so much. By the end of the book, I wanted too as well.

I love dinosaurs and bad b-horror movies, so this should have been for me. But it wasn’t, and not even my dino love will get me to pick up the next in the series. Sadly, not recommended.

– Frances Carden

Follow my reviews on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/xombie_mistress

Follow my reviews on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/FrancesReviews

Frances Carden
Latest posts by Frances Carden (see all)