Not that long ago, a movie like this one — rugged survival drama about an astronaut who has “crash-landed on an uncharted celestial body” and discovers that “there’s something alien out there” — would have ended with a solemn revelation like “and that planet… was Earth. *insert Charlton-Heston-they-did-it.gif*
Only M. Night Shyamalan attempts cheese like that anymore, almost always unsuccessfully, so — thank the Maker — 65 makes it perfectly clear from its opening credits, from its trailer even, that 65 million years ago on planet Earth is absolutely, definitely where Adam Driver’s downed star pilot finds himself. And not even with the sort of Velveeta that the film’s marketing description suggests! Direct quote: “Mills (Adam Driver) quickly discovers he’s actually stranded on Earth… 65 million years ago.” LOL, no. Such a “discovery” would require that he understands that he is living in the distant past of a species millions of years from evolving into a form in which it can even create a civilization. Why would he think that? As far as Mills is concerned, he has literally crash-landed on an uncharted celestial body inhabited by something literally alien, because he’s on a planet that is, by definition, alien to him.
(La-la-la *fingers in ears* don’t talk to me about the fact that Adam Driver’s 65-million-years-ago astronaut looks exactly like one of the very same upright bipedal primates who would go on to evolve on the planet he randomly happened to crash on all those megayears ago. I’m taking his physical biological appearance as sci-fi shorthand for “person from a technologically sophisticated culture.” Though maybe the movie could have at least given him a funny forehead or something, Star Trek style.)
Ironically enough, however, the notion that a long-ago spacefarer crashed on prehistoric (from our standpoint) Earth and has to survive dinosaurs remains the only nominally intriguing thing about 65, and of course it shoots that wad early on. This is a movie of few ideas and little suspense, mystery, or excitement. There aren’t even that many dinosaurs. *insert Ian-Malcolm-so-eventually-you-will-have-some-dinosaurs-on-this-dinosaur-tour.gif*
If only the writing-and-directing team of Scott Beck and Bryan Woods — among the screenwriters of A Quiet Place — actually explored the idea of Earth as an “alien” world! There is some brief initial power in the perspective-shift this setup demands: I dunno, some Battlestar Galactica–esque “this has happened before, and will happen again” shit, like. The movie never capitalizes on that, though, never even seems to appreciate that this is a possibility. There is nothing to 65 except Adam Driver (Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Logan Lucky) shepherding the only other survivor of their crash, a nine-year-old girl (Ariana Greenblatt: In the Heights, Love and Monsters) — he was the pilot, she was a passenger in cryofreeze — through a (minimally) dino-infested forest to what he hopes is an intact escape pod that might get them off the planet.
Driver’s intensely focused, utterly unironic performance is the only saving grace of 65, and the movie doesn’t deserve it. I’m not sure that many people realize that Driver was a US fucking Marine before he went into acting, but he deploys that honestly come-by military ferocity here. I wish the rest of the movie around him could rise to the dedication he brings to it.
Maybe the best(-worst) indication of the lack of imagination at play in 65 is the reason that Beck and Woods came up with to justify Driver’s pilot taking on the extreme mission that lands him in this mess in the first place: his young daughter (Chloe Coleman [Avatar: The Way of Water, My Spy]; watch this kid, she is going places), who mostly appears in flashbacks and in his stored videos, is really sick and needs expensive medical treatment, and this long-hauling piloting job will pay very well and help with that. Only American creators could fail to appreciate that even here and now, on planet Earth in the early 21st century, even before homo sapiens have mastered interstellar travel, only America among advanced wealthy nations makes you pay through the goddamn nose for health care for a sick child. It’s probably too much to expect that people who want to write science-fucking-fiction yet who cannot see past their own noses in the here and now can be expected to come up with anything more inventive than what we get here. Sad.
more films like this:
• Prospect [Prime US | Apple TV US | Apple TV UK | Hulu US | Sky Store UK]
• Jurassic Park [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV]
This movie was a real disappointment to me. The concept is kind of awesome. If the marketing people hadn’t given away the weird fact that this is earth, that could have been a cool reveal in the story.
If there had been more jokes than that scene where the girl is supposed to tie the rope securely and instead does some kind of weird spider web, it could have been funny.
If there was more thought put into the story, it could have been a cool story.
As it was, we get a capable pair of actors trying to carry a movie without any meaningful dialogue, and no real script.
The action feels like it’s right out of a video game. The “stab T-Rex in the eye with a fang covered in poison berry juice” is not even the biggest groan-inducing moment, which is saying something. I think the biggest groan from me is a guy dislocating his shoulder, after falling 30 meters, and then putting his shoulder and his hand bones back in forcibly, and then being able to stand and fight afterwards. Yeah RIGHT.
If they had hired me to work on this film, I’d have suggested that there be an elaborate third act to the film, after they escape. In this third act, we’d see things that had been strewn throughout the film, moments that made little sense or drew little attention, that would lead to the big reveal in the final scene. Some modern human like us would find a fossil evidence of a space ship crashed on earth 65 million years ago, or something. Or maybe we’d find out that we are, ourselves, somehow descended from, or have some DNA from these alien visitors.
In what way would that have been cool, though? How would it have changed the story, like, at all?
So they’re Adam and Eve, basically? That’s precisely the sort of 1950s sci-fi cheese I was talking about in my opening paragraph.