'Primitive War' Pits American GIs Against Dinosaurs During the Vietnam War

As if booby traps, underground tunnels and Viet Cong ambushes weren't dangerous enough for U.S. troops fighting in Vietnam, the soldiers in the new movie "Primitive War" have something else to contend with: dinosaurs.

The new horror thriller from writer-director Luke Sparke ("Occupation") takes viewers back in time to September 1968, the height of the Vietnam War. A detachment of American soldiers called Vulture Squad are sent into the bush to rescue a U.S. Army Special Forces team that went missing during a mission in North Vietnam. Alone in the jungle, the expert search-and-rescue force learns that a number of prehistoric thunder lizards somehow survived their mass extinction event and now live in the wilderness of Vietnam. And, soon enough, the members of Vulture Squad become prey.

The movie is based on writer Ethan Pettus' sci-fi military book series of the same name and features Tricia Helfer ("Battlestar Galactica"), Ryan Kwanten ("True Blood"), Jeremy Piven ("Entourage"), Nick Wechsler ("The Boys"), Jeremy Lindsay Taylor ("The Diplomat") and Anthony Ingruber ("Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny").

"I was captivated by the imagery surrounding Ethan's book and the story it told. I've worked hard on capturing that essence but also the grittiness, horror aspects and military edge," Sparke told Deadline during pre-production. "My vision is to feel like the characters have walked out of the film 'Platoon' and into the jaws of the greatest predators the planet has ever known."

Pettus said he came up with the idea for "Primitive War" when he was in high school after reading Tim O'Brien's beloved short-story collection "The Things They Carried."

"My only exposure to the Vietnam War was history classes and occasionally seeing the war movies that my dad liked to watch," Pettus told Military.com. "['The Things They Carried'] opened my eyes in a way that no book ever had, being able to actually viscerally perceive what people were going through during the conflict."

Sparke's feature-length film adaptation is just the latest iteration of Pettus' popular creation.

Since launching the original idea for "Primitive War" on Indiegogo in 2022, Pettus has expanded the concept to a second book in the series and a tabletop mini game. He also has a spinoff anthology book called "Dispatches" with disparate chapters set in some often-forgotten conflicts of the Cold War, like the 1976 Guangxi Massacre, Operation Dragon King in Burma in 1978 and the Angolan Civil War.

"It's trying to shine a light on these forgotten bits of important history," Pettus said. "Part of the reason why I wanted to write about war with dinosaurs is, I wanted to get people that normally would never have any interest in these conflicts to have a window into these wars and the experience of people in these conflicts."

Despite its Vietnam War background, the movie is being compared to "Jurassic Park," but the series is much more than an R-rated take on the concept of dinosaurs returning to a modern-day setting. The dinosaurs of "Primitive War" are an allusion to what humans go through in combat, be it the nightmarish memories that haunt them through post-traumatic stress disorder or fear of what they might have to do to survive.

"The dinosaurs, they're living metaphors throughout the books because they can be metaphors for so many different things," Pettus said. "The violence of the dinosaurs in the first novel and the way that they attack people reflect what most soldiers feared most back then, which was getting shot in the gut. At the same time, they're predominantly like ambush predators. So thinking about the conflict in Vietnam, and how so many of the battles fought were hit-and-run tactics."

"I may not be the most accurate when it comes to military technology and everything, but the best feedback I've ever gotten has been from actual veterans that served in modern conflicts," he added. "People who were in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria and even Vietnam, have reached out to me to tell me that I did a better job of explaining or describing the experience of PTSD than anything else that they had ever read."

The "Primitive War" movie does not yet have a release date. It is currently in post-production. Ethan Pettus' first "Primitive War" comic is currently available on Amazon, in paperback, Kindle and audiobook.

"I'm trying to capture the meaning of conflict and what conflict means to the people that are in it and what that experience is like for them," Pettus said. "I'm trying to create a window for people who normally would never have any interest to find out for themselves. I have nothing but the utmost respect for the American military, for anybody that has ever been in a conflict and suffered from it or seen suffering from it firsthand. I'm just trying to get more people interested in that reality, people who normally would never think twice about it."

Keep Up With the Best in Military Entertainment

Whether you're looking for news and entertainment, thinking of joining the military or keeping up with military life and benefits, Military.com has you covered. Subscribe to the Military.com newsletter to have military news, updates and resources delivered straight to your inbox.