The Primevals

Usually when a project has been shelved for a long time it's for a reason - either it's not that good to begin with or there's just not enough time or money to finish it properly. Thankfully The Primevals was the latter.

When I read the film's history I was fascinated by it - a movie almost fifty years in the making just couldn't be otherwise. David Allen had a distant vision of how it was going to be way back in the late sixties but only came as close as shooting it in the mid-nineties but still wasn't able to finish it before his death in 1999. Only twenty years later the movie was picked up to finally be finished and to pay proper respects to its original idea and the people behind the 1990s production. So, was it all worth waiting that long for? Absolutely.

First and foremost, The Primevals is a movie without CGI which is obscenely rare in the 21st century - instead it utilizes stop-motion, animatronics and puppetry to bring its creatures to life - a long forgotten art form since the rise of computers in the late 1970s, and it makes this movie truly stand out above all the recent ones. Sure, the creatures don't look realistic enough this way but this story is not about realism, it's about the soul.

Nowadays people tend to have completely forgotten what cinema is all about - originality, new ideas that give you food for thoughts, something you haven't seen or heard before, and not just a pretty picture with words. Don't get me wrong, The Primevals is no Citizen Kane, nor is it 2001: A space odyssey or even Star Wars - its story is far from being original even remotely as we've seen many alike examples in the 1950s and 1960s during the second Renaissance of stop motion movies but it's something that this work of art represents that makes it worthy being released now, in 2024. I'm sure would it have been released as soon as David Allen pitched his idea to the producers, or even in the 1990s when he shot the movie it would have been instantly lost among its contemporaries but today it ought to be remembered as a relic that's still more relevant and way better than most of its contemporaries.

The stop motion itself is nearly perfect and I was amazed at how well it's handled in the movie. The same was with the music score - simply beautiful, grandiose and is suitable for something more epic than what was on the screen but not less impressive in any way. The only downpoint is probably the actors and their wooden performances that hadn't given us the full spectrum of emotions when on a journey discovering a brand new world - it felt more like they've been doing this every other Sunday. The narrative moves itself here and the actors blindly follow it - it's not that uncommon in adventure flicks but still, it would have been nice to have at least one charismatic character among the bunch presented in The Primevals but there was none.

Overall I feel like no matter when the movie's released and what production hell it's been through The Primevals is a well-crafted picture hands down and I would have given it the same rating despite the circumstances.