Primeval
(Blu-ray + DVD-Video)
Picture:
B/C+ Sound: B+/B- Extras: C- Film: C-
Alligators
and crocodiles are usually limited to nature shots, but they occasionally have
been in action film sequences (what worked in Live & Let Die did not in Eraser)
and Horror/Monster films (the infamous The
Great Alligator, which really offered a crocodile) and now Disney (through
their Hollywood Pictures division) has delivered a giant, oversized digital
killer with Michael Katleman’s Primeval
and it is not good.
Dominic
Purcell, Orlando Jones and Brooke Langton play three press people who go down
to the deepest recesses of Africa and find themselves battling fascist
mercenaries and a 25-foot crocodile.
With occasional nods to Jaws,
this mess never takes off and wears thin quickly at 94 minutes. John Brancato and Michael Ferris co-wrote the
much smarter Terminator 3 (see my
HD-DVD review elsewhere on this site) and the infamous Catwoman, while Brancato wrote David Fincher’s The Game (again see my HD-DVD review elsewhere on this site). This mess leans more towards Catwoman, but at least that looked good
and was an unintended hoot at times.
This never begins to entertain and oh, and the digital monster is lame
throughout.
In both
cases, the filmmakers also got carried away with gutting the color and the
1080p digital High Definition image on the Blu-ray may be an improvement over
the anamorphically enhanced DVD, but Director of Photography Edward J. Pei,
A.S.C., just cannot overcome the terrible look of this film from digital
post-production. None of his shots are
that great, but you’ll wonder if he meant them to look better than this. Both versions have Dolby Digital 5.1 mixes,
but the Blu-ray sports a clearer and richer PCM 48/24 5.1 mix that has more
impact and shows that if the sound had not been o0verly sweetened, this could
have been really impressive sonically.
Extras
include deleted scenes that would not have helped, a making of featurette
lamely dubbed Croc-umentary, previews
for other Disney releases and audio commentary by Katleman and visual effects
supervisor Paul Linden on both discs.
- Nicholas Sheffo
