It started badly, but then it got worse. Adam Driver lives in space, and if I haven’t misunderstood the premise, he, his wife, and their sick daughter are part of a distant civilization of extraterrestrials who are extremely human, but not human at all.
The girl suffers from a disease whose treatment is very expensive and in order to be able to afford it, Mills (Driver) must work as a pilot in an expedition that travels through time and space. That a technically advanced space race, whose spaceships can pass through black holes and thus travel through time, and at the same time do not have the technology or the budget to treat a sick girl, is already strange to me. Perhaps this part of the story should have been stretched out and told a bit more, because the beginning is more interesting than anything it raises, and the introduction is, honestly, pretty pointless.
Mills’ spacecraft passes through a black hole, gets caught in an asteroid shower, sustains damage, and crashes to Earth 65 million years ago. Everyone dies except Mills and a girl who speaks a language Mills doesn’t understand. Their fight for survival begins when they leave the crashed ship and realize that the planet they are on is populated exclusively by Dread Lizards. Lots of hungry lizards.
65 is written and directed by the duo who wrote A Quiet Place. Scott Beck and Bryan Woods went from unknown to world famous almost overnight when John Krasinski’s acclaimed thriller put their screenwriting skills on the map. I love A Quiet Place, and I love A Quiet Place 2, so I had pretty high expectations for 65. If I had been waiting for a new After Earth or a new Battlefield: Earth, I’m sure I would have Could have passed this one movie without too much fuss, since clearly worse crap came out in the first three months of the year, but I can’t. I can’t. I thought it was going to be good. Like a dense, dark and violent mix between Interstellar, Pitch Black and Jurassic Park.
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It’s clear from the outset that Scott and Bryan have never made great movies before, as they skip key elements of basic drama, slavishly rush to structurally point to old timelines, and fail miserably at building real people to from their characters. Adam Driver’s space pilot has patterns and mystery, but he never manages to be anything more than a lost snarling old man with a 90s haircut dragging himself through the mud in the hope of escape the gaping jaws of terrorist lizards. . Young actress Ariana Greenblatt (Koa), who played little Gamora in Avengers: Infinity War, has too little screen time for viewers to care about her well-being, and the problem she and Mills speak different languages is not. it’s not something the script decides to stick with and work with, but most of the time they’re yelling at each other “I don’t understand what you’re saying”, which quickly becomes exhausting.
Also, the production design is poor. The forests on Earth the dinosaurs crawl through look like something out of a park near my house, and the cave they spend the night in is clearly molded in papier-mache and hastily painted with finger paint. It’s downright hideous, plain and simple. The dinosaurs themselves aren’t much better, having been designed by a programmer whose idea of ”recreating” what horror lizards once looked like fails. The T-Rex looks like a cross between a dog, Godzilla, and one of the monsters from A Quiet Place, and the fact that the Koa girl effortlessly kills a 30-ton T-Rex with a twig, I think, says that. long on this fiasco.