65
A lot of people would think that a film about Adam Driver battling dinosaurs cannot be boring, but that is the case with “65.”
The only thing this movie would have benefited more from is if it were much dumber. Making it an expensive science fiction flick which was allegedly made at $91 million and featured in a super bowl commercial should have celebrated its intrinsic B-movie origin. However, instead of trying to tell an outlandish survival tale alongside sorrowful family drama, attempts by this movie end up as rushed and poorly developed scenes (which amounts to nothing).
The characters are paper thin and the action sequences quickly become monotonous and tiring. We have always known how it goes: there is jump scare; overbearing score notes, running and screaming; gnashing of teeth; maybe someone gets hurt before barely escaping. Over and over again.
However, Scott Beck’s film takes on a contradiction in premise that makes it interesting. It is set 65 million years ago though suggesting the existence of futuristic civilizations throughout different planets across the universe during that particular time. Notably, one such planet has Adam Driver as Mills who happens to be space pilot for them all. He is headed for a two year-long journey into the unknown so that he can raise enough money to treat his daughter’s illnesses (this movie also features Chloe Coleman from My Spy as her child in some opening episodes and few other video fragments).
Mills’ ship gets destroyed by asteroids after accidentally entering an asteroid field while route to its destination and crashes. All passengers in cryogenic sleep die except one girl around her age who coincidentally happens to survive too. Koa played by Ariana Greenblatt plays this character. And oh! The planet looks like Earth with its swampy landscape similar to Dagobah just happens to be wait for it Earth at all.
In “65”, Mills and Koa need to carry the wreckage all the way up to a mountain top so that they can steal an escape pod from there and fly off in it before some dinosaurs come around stomping and eating them. Some of the creatures are quite startling, while others look so fake and cheap that they seem like animatronics at Chuck E. Cheese’s.
Yet! The film could have even gone farther into this silliness or played with how dumb it is to give any thought of complex technology in relation to this Cretaceous period. Prehistoric Mills doesn’t even use his advanced gadgets for anything interesting here. Most attempts at humor fall flat Koa makes fun of Mills as being uptight most of the time and moments of peril always conclude too neatly for us to relish their suspense.
Worse yet? Driver’s character, unfortunately, isn’t allowed more room to play over the top here. His intensity is both thrilling and funny when he lets loose in self-aware ways: think about him screaming “More!!!” as he strikes Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: The Last Jedi or punching a wall during an argument on Marriage Story. But his role in 65 is just a traditionally heroic one with no personality gratingly annoyed all the time for nothing basically Greenblatt does her level best with a character that nobody knows anything about whatsoever.
Koa speaks another language rather than English; therefore she mimics what basic words he tells her such as ‘family’ since she can never understand what he means. They have no real bond between each other neither is there any sort of prickly tension since they’re stuck with each other anyway but not for long because they will be separated after all This surely may not be “The Last Of Us.”
Beck and Woods do offer some clever cinematography here and there along with equally bizarre editing choices. Apart from that, they also recycle lots from the “Jurassic Park” movies: a giant footprint in the mud or a dinosaur’s yellow eye leering menacingly through a window. But maybe that’s inevitable at this point. Their film gets really enjoyably crazy only from almost the end, with a sneaky quicksand patch, ravenous Tyrannosaurus rex, well-timed geyser eruption and catastrophic asteroid rain to climax it all. Unfortunately for us, and our planet it is already too late by then.
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