It's not a good idea when the marketing campaign is better than the film. I know, this often happens. I mean, it is the job of the studio to make the film look appealing to its potential audience. The campaign mounted for Primeval took a novel approach to marketing a movie about a giant crocodile. Rather than show it as the monster movie it is, they chose to take the serial killer angle. Interesting. It disguises what it really is, but still pays off in its promise of carnage. It's a shame the movie doesn't live up to the marketing.
Primeval plays between the fictional horror of the killer croc and the real horror of civil war in Africa — both are brutal, bloody, and unforgiving. I found it to have a similar structure to Edward Zwick's Blood Diamond. Both of these films have reporters in Africa seeking to uncover a dark secret (diamonds and crocs), and both lead to questions of how far to go and whether or not to keep a secret or expose the difficult truths. However, that is about where the similarities end.
Unlike Blood Diamond, Primeval mashes its threads together without truly integrating them into a story. It is kind of like some writer was working on a story about African civil war and another was working on a crocodile monster movie. They both realize that neither one can come up with enough material for a complete movie and decided to pool their resources. So, they took what they had created thus far, shuffled the pages together, slapped on a couple of band aids, and thus, Primeval was born out of the ashes of potential failure.
A disgraced news reporter (Dominic Purcell of Prison Break) is assigned to a story to travel to Africa with his cameraman and comic relief (Orlando Jones), an animal reporter, and a Steve Irwin-esque crocodile expert. Joining them on their journey is a crusty guide (Jurgen Prochnow) who seems to have a personal stake in seeing the demise of the cold-blooded killer.
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Article comments
1 - Deano
"the fictional horror of the killer croc" -
Actually Gustave is a very real Nile croc that is supposedly 20 ft in length and weighs in at about 2000 lbs. He is reputed to have killed hundreds of people over recent years, supposedly due to the fact that he has grown so large the usual shore birds and fish do not suffice for his diet, instead he dines on other crocs and people around the densely populated Lake Tanganyika.
There is an excellent article (probably which gave rise to the damn movie in the first place) at National Geographic.