Bullet Points: 65
The Tagline for 65 is “65 Million years ago prehistoric Earth had a visitor”. That sounds more ominous than I think it’s supposed to sound but it also sounds pretty damned cool. It seemed like a large portion of my childhood was spent playing as “me in another time or location”. Whether I was fighting off Pirates with a machine gun and a lightsaber or taking on velociraptors with my legendary martial arts skills, that fish out of water tale was as good as gold to me. Hence, my quiet excitement for 65 and it’s own version of “guy in prehistoric Earth with spacegun”.
Synopsis: An astronaut crash lands on a mysterious planet only to discover he’s not alone.
- The allure of Adam Driver: I don’t think it’s a controversial statement to say that Adam Driver is not a handsome man. He’s a fantastic actor and that makes his performances seem so much better since I, too, am not a man with classic Hollywood looks. If there was ever a leading man that made me think I had a shot to star in a big budget film it would be Driver. His less than perfect features and chiseled jawline allow him to seem more relatable while at the same time giving him a masculinity that other pretty boys like Chris Pine or the other Chris’s can never have. Consider me a fan of Driver.
- Save the girl: Driver plays Mills, a pilot who has just accepted a two-year job/mission for his company. He’ll be escorting a group of cryogenically frozen people back from somewhere that doesn’t matter but more importantly, he’s doing it so he can earn enough money to pay for his daughter’s medical treatment. It’s something that is weighing heavily on him as he’ll have to be away from his family but it’s also something that could potentially be life saving for her.
- The search for life: Minutes after Mills decides that he must take the job to give his daughter the best chance at survival, we see him crashing his ship onto an uncharted planet. Like so often seems to happen in movies, the ship was struck by an unexpected cluster of asteroids and gets downed on a planet in a very violent way. Mills quickly discovers that his cargo (frozen people) is all beat to hell except for one with a young girl in it. Like any good company man, he is focused on saving as many of the members of his cargo as he can but he only is able to salvage the girl named Koa.
- Lone Wolf and Cub: I’m not certain that the writer/directors (Scott Beck and Bryan Woods of A Quiet Place fame) had this series in mind but the film does share elements with the Lone Wolf and Cub series. Mainly that a lone warrior seems to be traversing the land with a young child in tow but this movie changes up that formula a bit by having the child be around 10 years old and she’s definitely not defenseless. In fact, the girl Koa ends up being quite the badass and saves Mills’ tail on more than one occasion.
- A race against time: The smartest thing the film does is giving the survivors a reason for walking around like dummies knowing that there are massive and deadly creatures around. Mills has already used what communication equipment he could salvage from the crash to send out an SOS but now he and Koa are forced to find a way to escape. It turns the movie from a survival flick (which it never really pretends to be) to a race against time flick but with Dinosaurs!
- Not really a twist: The movie spends the first ten minutes or so setting up the plot and then we see him stranded on a planet. Pan the camera out and see a massive footprint in the mud and boom — we’re on prehistoric Earth! This plays out like it was meant to be a big twist but it felt like it was 90% of the marketing campaign for the film. A real twist would’ve been that they crash land, with no chance of escape, and become something of an Adam and Eve on the planet. Kinda icky, given their ages, but definitely unexpected. The movie does recover from this a bit by giving them their reason for escape but that opening third of the film felt a bit off.
- Human horror: Coming from the horror genre has really helped Scott Beck and Bryan Woods. I feel like horror writers and directors really understand the human dynamic better and it seems to come across really well in their scripts. Much like A Quiet Place, the feelings of loss and grief are front and center in every character of this film and it dictates to a point how they react to their new situations. Unlike AQP, 65 seems to spin its wheels when it isn’t giving us flashbacks or watching old videos of past events.
The Verdict: Not all movies are meant to win awards and stay with you for the rest of your lives. 65 won’t do either but I did have a fair amount of fun watching it. The concept of a spaceship landing on Earth millions of years ago has some very real tastiness for me since I grew up watching shows like DinoRiders and I’ll bite on anything that might come close to that but this does fail in a few very important areas. Adam Driver and Ariana Greenblatt carry 99% of the film on their shoulders and I would argue that they do it well but there just isn’t much to this dino flick and I would say that their performances are wasted by a weak script. The film is essentially a point A to point B kind of adventure and nothing really interesting happens during that trip except for some mid-level dino CGI and a bunch of walking. Still, it’s hard to pass on this type of fun and just the fact that we’re getting a movie like this makes me happy.
