Raptor Island (2004)

Plot

A counter-terrorist group set off to rescue an undercover agent and destroy a cache of weapons belonging to the terrorist Azir on a ship in the middle of the South China Sea. Unfortunately Azir, some of his men and their hostage manage to escape on a speedboat and land on a remote island. The counterterrorist team follows them onto the island but they all soon find out they're not alone. They share the island with deadly prehistoric raptors, hungry for the taste of fresh meat.

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Review

Quite how as many raptors as this manage to live on this tiny atoll (the film mentions it being about two miles in diameter) without any obvious sustainable food source is one of the many questions that this Sci-Fi Channel offering throws up. If you think about the basic mechanics of an ecosystem, a large population of highly active carnivorous dinosaurs requires an enormous amount of sustenance. They need a lot of meat. So how does a tiny two-mile stretch of isolated land support a breeding population of massive predators when there is absolutely no obvious food source? I found myself trying to do the biological math in my head and it doesn't work. Are they just eating each other? Because if they are, the ecosystem collapses in a week. That lack of baseline logic is crucial because it establishes Raptor Island’s core ethos for the viewer right out of the gate. It broadcasts that the filmmakers are prioritising a flashy concept - mercenaries shooting dinosaurs - over any kind of grounded reality. And when a film does that, it risks isolating the audience immediately. You don't consciously pause the screen to calculate the square footage of an island, but your brain subconsciously tracks logic. If the environment itself doesn't feel authentic, if it openly defies the basic laws of geography and ecology, your brain just starts to reject the narrative. You end up with a film where the very ground the characters are walking on feels fake. And when a film’s foundational reality is that brittle, it puts an immense amount of pressure on the central spectacle to carry the entire illusion. I think you can tell by now that I was reading far too much into Raptor Island when I sat down to watch it. But these things are important!

What about the fact that the atoll itself looks like Bulgaria (oh wait that's where it was shot) with no attempt to make it look like a tropical island? What about the numerous fire fights between specially trained counter-terrorist troops and the terrorists where they stand about 5ft away from each other and manage to unload a few clips without hitting anything? Or the ‘dumbing down’ of the raptors - we've been conditioned by pop culture to expect highly intelligent, voracious, organised pack hunters. Right? Like from Jurassic Park. But far from being the clever, intelligent predators they were assumed to be, here they just stand around and screech whilst being pumped full of lead. I can tolerate bad films if there is a smattering of intelligence and realism in them. I can't tolerate films that proceed to blow away reality with as much stupidity in them as possible. Why bother having a team of counter-terrorists as the main heroes when they can't shoot anything within a small radius of themselves? Within the first five minutes, you already know that this team hasn't a chance in hell of lasting to the end. If they can't shoot terrorists standing in front of them, what hope do they have against raptors launching themselves in attack formations?

The action swiftly moves to the island where the raptors just randomly appear. “Raptors have been extinct for more than a 100 million years,” says one soldier. “Somebody forgot to tell them,” replies another soldier. That’s it as far as explanations go. I know that any film called Raptor Island doesn't exactly try and hide the monster-of-the-day but the fact that they just stroll into view is a bit of a disappointment. Where is the build up to their eventual appearance? Generate a bit of excitement why don't you? The raptors do look rubbish as well. I mentioned their lack of intelligence on screen but this is heavily dictated by the extreme limitations of the animation itself. The CGI models are incredibly restricted in what they can do. They aren't dynamic creatures interacting with their environment. They have a very select, rigid menu of programmed movements. It's just this tiny, fixed set of animations: they walk, they run, they stand in place, they turn their heads, they do a little hop, and they fall over dead. That is the entire behavioural repertoire. 

The CGI guys didn't even bother making any effort to integrate the effects either. One scene shows two raptors approaching a soon-to-be victim. He fires his gun but instead of aiming at one of them, he just fires down the middle and misses them both. Needless to say, this clever idea sees the guy getting ripped apart in no time. There's also a T-Rex thrown in for good measure, presumably because the raptors were too small to base a finale around and they needed a big T-Rex to stomp along the beach, though this isn’t called T-Rex Island. When the raptors get shot, they look like they're being hit with paintballs – a generic computer-generated squib which is just animated briefly over the dinosaur's body, and then the bullet wounds vanish without a trace. I have never faced a raptor but I am sure that a few bullets in well-aimed places would take it down, except for these super-raptors. They absorb clip after clip, watch the TV, have a smoke, go to bed and then get back up to find the humans still gunning away at them. When the script finally decides that one of them has taken enough damage and it falls over dead, the other raptors in the pack just casually jog away like nothing happened. They show absolutely no signs of injury, no distress, no reaction to the gunfire whatsoever. If you've ever played a buggy video game, you know exactly what this feels like. It's like when the enemy AI gets stuck in an idle animation loop and you, the player, are just standing there emptying your weapon into their face and they just stare blankly back at you.

As with all of the Sci-Fi Channel's lame monster films, they need to have a human bad guy. Like prehistoric dinosaurs isn’t enough of a threat to cope with! The addition of the terrorists is simply to add in a human adversary to keep our hero occupied for as long as possible so that they don't need to show the monsters as much. When the CGI is as bad as it is here, that's not necessarily a bad thing. The elite commando label is just cheap narrative shorthand. It gives the heroes immediate authority and cool tactical gear without the writers having to spend any screen time developing their backgrounds - they look cool, but they can't actually hit anything because if they hit their targets, the firefight ends. By making both the elite commandos and the terrorists incredibly inaccurate, the filmmakers can fill up plenty of runtime with guys in tactical gear shooting blank cartridges at trees in the Bulgarian woods. It provides a cheap, practical adversary to keep the heroes occupied. The sheer incompetence of the human characters is a direct byproduct of needing the firefights to last as long as possible to eat up the clock so they don't have to spend money animating the monsters. Their terrible aim is literally a budget saving mechanism: they are shooting at nothing, so the animators don't have to draw anything. That is equal parts brilliant and cynical.

Steven Bauer chews up the scenery with a typical ropey Eastern European accent (because we all know you can't have Middle Eastern terrorists in films now - it's all mass murderers from the Balkans now) and spends most of his time running from something. Lorenzo Lamas stars but truth be told I'd never heard of the guy until I started watching these low budget Sy Fy films. I've checked his history on IMDB and he's been around for a bit but starring roles in dreck this like is never going to propel you to anything worthwhile, except maybe the benefits office. He barks out everything he says as though he's the lead singer in some doom metal band - depressed, angry and wanting to hurt something. Veteran actor Peter Jason pops up in a small role. It’s all a moot point anyway as the grand explanation for the raptors living on the island turns out to be a plane crashed there which happened to be carrying atomic waste, and the radiation leaking from this waste supposedly caused the local island wildlife to biologically devolve into specific, prehistoric Jurassic-era creatures. The female lead explicitly points out in the dialogue that the island is still radioactive. It is currently irradiated, which creates this ultimate hilarious absurdity in the plot. If the island is currently covered in atomic radiation, that means even if our heroes manage to survive the glitchy CGI raptors, and they survive the endless padding firefights, and they successfully escape the island, they’re all doomed. They have been running around an unshielded atomic waste dump for the entire film and are all going to die of severe radiation poisoning or lymphoma.

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Final Verdict

Even the lousy Carnosaur films and Raptor were better than this. It shouldn’t take much for someone to read over a script and immediately begin to work out some of the glaring issues in Raptor Island but this is just conveyor belt filmmaking and there’s no cause for concern over whether the end product is any good or not. It was made to fill a TV slot or sell a few copies on DVD before the next cookie cutter creature feature was churned out in the same fashion. It keeps people employed in the industry and gives washed-up stars something to do but they’re not films to be engaging too much with. There was a loosely affiliated sequel called Planet Raptor released a few years later which is just as dreadful and because one island wasn’t enough, they needed a whole planet to fill with CGI raptors.

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Raptor Island Director(s): Stanley Isaacs Writer(s): Stanley Isaacs, Dean Widenmann Actor(s): Lorenzo Lamas, Steven Bauer, Hayley DuMond, Michael Cory Davis, Peter Jason, Hristo Shopov, Nasko Srebrev, Jonas Talkington Duration: 89 mins