Primeval manages to comment on how Americans view Africa, specifically the media, when only a sensationalist story about a man-eating croc garners attention to the region amidst civil war and genocide.

Average critic: What? This is just a stupid movie about a big reptile. Did we see the same movie dude?

Why yes, yes we did.

While it's easy to dismiss this movie, like, well, I did before I saw it, the reality of it is that the film strives to overachieve. Even with all its shortcomings and missteps to making it to the big screen, it manages to leave at least a small mark.

First, we had the awful ad campaigns that frankly lied; the movie is not about a damn serial killer. The TV spots finally recognized the fact that a crocodile is the one doing all the killings while playing up the fact that it is based on a true story. On top of that, the film is dumped in theatres in January, which is usually a nail in the coffin.

The movie starts out with a young white female pathologist investigating a mass grave. After tagging bodies and talking to the young boy that found the grave, she finds another mound of dirt. Thinking it's another mass grave, she begins to dig in, only to discover it's actually Gustave, the killer croc in question. He rises up and eats her.

This, in a nutshell, is the core of the movie. When the white American walks directly from the mass grave to Gustave's hiding place, only to be eaten, this directly ties the two plot points together, and they never separate.

In fact, the next thing we see is Tim getting an assignment from his boss (he works at media giant NNC-hmmm) to go shoot a story on Gustave. Tim, who is mainly interested in journalism to change the world, jumped the gun on his last story and is in danger of being fired, so he begrudgingly accepts the job. He is joined by his cameraman Steven, Aviva, and Steve Irwin-ish Matthew, and they set out to find the feared crocodile.

Surprisingly, the main focus of the film is on the political situation in Africa. It's no coincidence it takes a young white woman to die in the region to attract the attention of the news media. Most of the villagers talk about "Little Gustave," who is a warlord that is ruling most of the Burundi/Rwanda border area with extreme brutality. With the mass killings and executions, Darfur and Rwanda genocides spring to mind, and are in fact cited within the movie, usually with the context of Americans only caring about those situations if it directly affects them or is part of another story such as, say, a giant man-eating crocodile.

While a prominent plot point, Gustave is kept physically in the background, so he never has a real chance to hog the camera and turn the movie into a CGI fest. His few scenes can be somewhat intense, and there is plenty of blood and gore to appease the monster chomping quota, but it never reached the level of camp.

One of the biggest problems I had was the casting. Casting Dominic Purcell is almost a death sentence for a film; though his heart is in the right place, the guy can't act his way out of a tin can. Orlando Jones plays his usual comedic relief character, but manages to hit a few key scenes well enough. I especially enjoyed Gideon Emery as the crocodile loving Australian, and it was an odd coincidental homage to the beloved Irwin.

There are a few good scenes that really accentuate the differences between the Americans and the Africans, namely the incredibly awkward campfire sing-a-long, where the American troupe tries to sing "Amazing Grace" to the confused tribe. Orlando Jones' Steven holds stereotypical views of Africa on the way there, but once he arrives he realizes that the people in Burundi hold no love for him; no matter his skin color, he is an American, and a cocky one at that. Later in the film, trudging through the swamp avoiding crocodiles and henchmen, he half-jokingly laments that maybe slavery wasn't such a bad idea, just to get "a black man out of Africa." While this may be construed as incredibly racist, the idea is that Steven obviously held a fantastical ideal of Africa in his head, and when the reality of the situation hit, he was only interested in getting out.

This is also shown when Steven stumbles across a family being slaughtered. He manages to film the whole thing, which he shows to his friends. "I'm going to have nightmares for years," he says, forgetting the fact that he just witnessed a family being butchered. While everyone else wants to get the footage to the UN, Steven merely wants to dump it and go home.

Unfortunately, the script tended to drop most of this poignancy during the last third of the movie during action sequences only to sloppily pick it back up with a few throwaway lines. Also, for the most part, director Michael Katleman plays it pretty safe with his directing. There's a few of the prerequisite "we're walking in Africa" long shots, and we never get too close to the characters to totally care about their survival, though one death did manage to affect me a little.

The real irony, to me, is the aforementioned misleading marketing. While I'm sure it was intended to try and increase sales, I had to admit the point was strangely identical to the situation in the movie; why does it take manipulation like this to turn our heads? The only reason the characters went to film the croc was because of the potential follow-up about the young pathologist, and likewise some of us went expecting a serial killer movie, some of us a killer croc movie, and the majority of us never realizing we would be treated to a lesson on foreign policy in the midst of a monster movie.

Again, it's very easy to dismiss this movie as just a brain dead popcorn movie, but some viable points are made, and while it drops the ball a few times during the film, it's a pretty impressive first big screen outing by Katleman who has managed to make a film that has shades of Godzilla as well as Hotel Rwanda.

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