65

There’s a tweet I think of quite often when I’m watch­ing a film with review­ing in mind: ​“Why must a movie be ​“good”? Is it not enough to sit some­where dark and see a beau­ti­ful face, huge?” It’s a sen­ti­ment I kept cir­cling back to while watch­ing Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ 65 – a fair­ly dire and deriv­a­tive dino sci-fi – with regards to Adam Driver’s on-screen presence.

Every so often a new think-piece appears lament­ing the death of the movie star. Social media has brought us clos­er to the A‑Lister than ever before, and in the process oblit­er­at­ed much of the mys­tique that once made the rich and famous seem oth­er­world­ly. This, com­bined with the glob­al dom­i­na­tion of var­i­ous fran­chise jug­ger­nauts which see our best and bright­est reduced to dead-behind-the-eyes cogs in an increas­ing­ly unwieldy machine, indi­cate we’re hold­ing out for a hero. Dri­ver, with his deep bass voice and utmost pro­fes­sion­al­ism even in the face of awful writ­ing and janky CGI, is per­haps our great hope.

In 65, he plays Mills, a pilot trav­el­ling from the dis­tant plan­et Somaris, 65 mil­lion years in the past, hav­ing reluc­tant­ly left his wife and sick­ly daugh­ter Nevine (Chloe Cole­man) at home. (NB: It’s nev­er real­ly estab­lished if Mills is a human sim­ply liv­ing on a dif­fer­ent plan­et, or an alien who mere­ly looks, sounds, and acts like one.) When his ship hits an aster­oid field and crash lands on our fair plan­et, Mills and his sin­gle sur­viv­ing pas­sen­ger – a young girl named Koa (Ari­ana Green­blatt) who doesn’t speak the same lan­guage as Mills – attempt to locate a miss­ing escape pod so they can go home.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly Mills and Koa have land­ed dur­ing the Cre­ta­ceous peri­od, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and they imme­di­ate­ly see Mills and Koa as two tasty snack-shaped morsels. With­in min­utes of land­ing, Mills is forced to bash one dino’s brains in with the butt of his space gun, in a scene that recalls The Simp­sons Tree­house of Hor­ror V seg­ment ​‘Time and Pun­ish­ment‘. Such set pieces quick­ly become com­mon­place as the qua­si father-daugh­ter duo fight for sur­vival, wreck­ing hav­oc on the nat­ur­al habi­tat as they go.

Dri­ver, to his great cred­it, is such a bril­liant actor he almost sells this film sin­gle-hand­ed­ly. He imbues the woe­ful­ly under­writ­ten Mills with a sense of grav­i­tas, mak­ing up for a lack of tan­gi­ble char­ac­ter traits with his surly sto­icism and occa­sion­al moments of endear­ing lev­i­ty. Full cred­it to Dri­ver for pro­vid­ing such a won­der­ful per­for­mance under such try­ing con­di­tions. The man is nev­er any­thing less than a con­sum­mate pro­fes­sion­al, even when falling into a bog or squish­ing a giant bug on the back of his neck. And yes, he looks good doing it – Dri­ver car­ries him­self like Charl­ton Hes­ton in Plan­et of the Apes. He’s com­mit­ted to this per­for­mance and the plot, despite it hav­ing more holes than Swiss cheese.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly Driver’s immense tal­ent can’t quite gloss over the dis­tract­ing strange­ness of 65, with its flim­sy under-explained premise, com­i­cal­ly vicious crea­tures, and jar­ring­ly bru­tal set pieces. Though the cen­tral rela­tion­ship owes much to James Cameron’s Aliens, when the film straight up rips ideas and shots from Juras­sic Park dur­ing its grand T.Rex show­down, it becomes over­whelm­ing­ly evi­dent that Beck and Woods (best known for writ­ing A Qui­et Place) don’t have enough orig­i­nal ideas here to sus­tain even a fair­ly zip­py 93-minute runtime.

There’s per­haps a ker­nel of a good film here, and a lead per­for­mance that’s bet­ter than it has any need to be, but shod­dy exe­cu­tion, lazy world-build­ing and a com­plete fail­ure to cap­i­talise on any of the poten­tial­ly inter­est­ing threads that (per­haps acci­den­tal­ly) appear means 65 has less of an impact than the har­row­ing final episode of 90s sit­com The Dinosaurs.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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