65

When the trailer for 65 - the new film from A Quiet Place scribes Scott Beck & Bryan Woods - first released, it caused a brief-but-exuberant stir on social media over its delectably high-concept premise… a sci-fi action-thriller, featuring Adam Driver as an astronaut whose ship somehow travels back through time and crash-lands on Earth circa the Cretaceous period. In truth, the setup didn’t promise much more than a cheesy marriage of dinosaurs and laser guns and, it turns out, was misinterpreted anyway… Driver’s lead character, Mills, isn’t an astronaut at all; but rather an alien humanoid who chances upon a planet that, as far as he’s concerned, is simply a random rock crawling with overgrown lizards.

It’s a rather crucial distinction, as it wipes out nearly all of the screenplay’s presumed emotional underpinnings. But then the film is almost startlingly basic in its execution. Mills, we learn, is a pilot who’s been accepting lengthier and lengthier space gigs in order to cover his ailing daughter’s medical expenses back on, uh… *checks notes*… “Somaris.” Caught in an asteroid shower, his damaged ship ends up in a smoking crater on Earth - the cryo-pods containing the passengers scattered like dandelion seeds. There’s only one other survivor… a young girl named Koa (Ariana Greenblatt, who’s like Hailee Steinfeld’s JV understudy), whose foreign tongue makes even rudimentary communication a challenge. She and Mills need to journey from point A to point B in order to reach a still-functional escape shuttle. They encounter some dinosaurs along the way. And that’s basically the entire movie - all 88 minutes worth.

Beck & Woods rightfully earned plaudits for their ingenious Quiet Place concept, but their only prior filmmaking credit of note was the humdrum horror pic Haunt. Clearly no studio was going to hand them a Jurassic World-sized budget to make this film, yet they lack the sort of instinctive, B-movie ingenuity that’s needed to compensate. There are moments that stand out - such as when Mills tangles with a hostile dino in a cave, and the camera pans over to a holographic projection of the fight on his scanner - but these are few and far between. How Beck & Woods managed to rope Driver into starring is anyone’s guess - it’s the weirdest marriage between A-list star and disposable B-movie dreck since Michael Fassbender appeared in Assassin’s Creed. Driver and Greenblatt aren’t bad together, but the timing is terrible - coming directly on the heels of The Last of Us, their surrogate father/daughter bond feels deeply lacking. The emotional impact is comparatively vacant.​

All of this is quite disappointing. 65 is exactly the sort of picture we need more of in theaters - a digestible serving of mid-budget (and mid-ambition) genre innovation; creativity divorced - refreshingly - from the repressive binds of IP. But this is a plot hook in search of a movie - its narrative dimensions are barely even sketched in. The climax (involving a pair of T-Rexes - though the film in general seems to play fast and loose with paleontology) does have a certain lumbering pulp grandeur… but Beck & Woods neglect to pursue even the most obvious and nominal of narrative payoffs (such as Mills leaving behind alien tech that’s unearthed millions of years later). The film’s tagline (reiterated in the opening titles) declares “65 millions years ago, prehistoric Earth had a visitor.” Frankly, given the way the movie unfolds, you might be inclined to shrug and respond “Big deal.”