65 (2023)

Studio:     Columbia Pictures
Director:    Scott Beck, Bryan Woods
Writer:     Scott Beck, Bryan Woods
Producer:  Sam Raimi, Deborah Liebling, Zainab Azizi, Scott Beck, Bryan Woods
Stars:     Adam Driver, Ariana Greenblatt, Chloe Coleman, Nika King

Review Score:

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Summary:

An interplanetary pilot must defend a young girl from deadly dinosaurs after their spaceship crashes on a prehistoric world.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Space pilot Mills leaves behind his wife and his sick daughter Nevine on the planet Somaris to undertake a two-year exploration mission. An asteroid collision causes Mills’s ship to crash on a prehistoric planet revealed to be Earth 65 million years in our past. Mills and a nine-year-old girl named Koa, who speaks a different language than Mills, are the only survivors.

Mills learns one of his ship’s escape vessels, which will enable him to return to space, crashed on a distant mountain. Mills convinces Koa to join his journey to the escape pod by promising that her parents, who died in the crash, will be there.

Despite their language barrier, Mills and Koa form a father and daughter-like bond as he protects her from various dinosaur encounters and environmental hazards on their hike to the mountain. Along the way, Mills discovers that the same asteroid storm that wrecked his ship is headed toward the planet, bringing with it the asteroid that will wipe out all dinosaurs.

Upon reaching the escape ship, Koa realizes Mills lied to her about her parents being alive. Mills re-bonds with Koa through emotional video messages from Nevine, who died from her illness, that Mills received throughout cryostasis.

A Tyrannosaurus Rex suddenly attacks Mills, Koa, and the escape vessel. Koa uses footage from a holo-image of Nevine to distract the dinosaur, allowing Mills an opportunity to shoot it dead. However, a second T-Rex appears. This time, Mills lures it away to ensure Koa can escape alone, but Koa ends up rescuing Mills by triggering a geyser that kills the creature. Mills and Koa then escape in the ship just before the dinosaur-eradicating asteroid devastates Earth.

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Review:

I don’t fully understand “65.”  I don’t mean the story.  Even a person only paying half attention can follow that easily enough.

Adam Driver plays Mills, a spaceship pilot who makes the difficult decision to leave behind a wife and ill daughter on his home world of Somaris to undertake a two-year exploration mission.  An unanticipated asteroid collision causes his ship to crash on a prehistoric planet, leaving Mills and a young girl named Koa as the only survivors.  If they can get to an escape vessel that landed on a distant mountain, Mills and Koa might be able to make it back to space.  They’ll just have to fight their way through a series of deadly dinosaur encounters while forging a surrogate parent-child bond first.

When you size up that straightforward setup, it’s also easy to understand what makes “65” an attractive project to produce.  Taking a page from indie horror’s playbook for keeping staging simple, “65” only features two main actors, meaning there are fewer bodies to wrangle on set and fewer star salaries to pay.  As long as you don’t count the images on a passenger manifest, only four faces are seen in the entire film.  The other two belong to Mills’s family, who appear in a prologue where we see Mills embracing his wife and giggling with his daughter in a brief moment that establishes their love as economically, and as stereotypically, as possible.  End credits don’t even deem the wife important enough to earn a name, identifying her only as “Nevine’s Mother,” which attaches her to a character she doesn’t even interact with.

There’s not a whole lot of dialogue either.  Mills and Koa speak different languages, so they have a barrier that forces them to communicate through gestures and overt expressions.  That might sound like a novel way to build a relationship, except it limits the depth that any drama can develop between them.

Then again, “getting tricky” isn’t even close to becoming an item anywhere on “65’s” agenda.  Actors appear to have spent as much time in front of a green screen as they did on location, working with a camera that keeps things tight, likely to hide how small some scenes are.  Production probably didn’t take more than three, maybe four weeks, allowing Adam Driver to say, “Sure, why not” before sliding “65’s” comparatively quick and dirty shoot between big blockbusters or intense arthouse dramas.

No, what’s difficult to wrap one’s head all the way around is “65’s” quizzically riskless creative structure.  If you don’t already know, the prehistoric planet that Mills and Koa land on is Earth.  That’s not a spoiler.  The title screen blurts it out with text under the massive 65 logo that adds, “… million years ago – a visitor crash landed – on Earth.”

Ok.  But why though?  Earth means absolutely nothing to the two characters.  It certainly doesn’t mean anything to Mills, for whom this is just another uncharted planet in an undiscovered section of a solar system.  To the audience, it’s neither a “Planet of the Apes”-type twist nor a useful revelation seeing as how title screen text spills the beans.  So what’s the point?

Later in the movie, Mills learns the asteroid belt that damaged his ship is now headed toward the planet, and it’s bringing the Big One that will ultimately destroy all dinosaurs on Earth.  It might have been amusing if it turned out his spaceship inadvertently altered the asteroid’s course, making him indirectly responsible for the extinction event that eradicated countless creatures, or anything remotely clever like that.  Alas, “65” has no such swerve up its sleeve.

Like a grandma too timid to cross the street for fear of getting grazed by a bicycle, “65” sticks to playing it safe at all times.  Given the dead daughter + uneasy alliance with a new girl narrative, there’s an obvious Joel and Ellie from “The Last of Us” vibe as Mills merely takes Koa on a textbook hero’s journey from Point A to Point B.  They run, they crawl, they fall, they struggle.  They even have an encounter with quicksand like they’re suddenly in a Looney Tunes short.  There are minor scrapes, medium skirmishes, and finally one big battle with, what else, a T-Rex who has the impeccable timing and location sense to show up at the escape ship just as the countdown clock reaches critical mass.

Basically what we have here is a mediocre movie whose main draw is “Adam Driver fights dinosaurs.”  Those four words alone justify the film’s existence, as well as a good reason to want to watch it.  It just would have been preferable to see his character relying more on wits over weaponry, inventively using the environment instead of firing his laser gun and detonating pulse bombs in un-thrilling encounters that can’t end in mortal injury anyway since there are only two people in the plot.  I suppose what surprises me most about “65’s” ordinary approach to being an average action-adventure is that it was made by Sony and not Netflix, since it feels like ideal filler to stuff on a streaming service where it can gather digital dust.

Review Score: 50

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