65
Just before “65” came out, I noticed someone who was surprised why we hadn’t really seen a run of other movies trying to cash in on dinosaurs in the wake of the “Jurassic” series over the years. I’m sure there are several schlocky monster movies that tried, but they were right that major studios have not really tried, no doubt because they knew how high a bar those movies set in terms of effects, and anything else would be a pretender. Kudos to Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, however, for finding an interesting way into it, although I wish we had gotten filmmakers more accustomed to mid-high budget spectacle in the director’s chair- they can only take this film so far before you feel like they’ve run out of gas staging these action scenes.
One of the things that will probably jar you most is how this isn’t necessarily a time travel movie about how Adam Driver’s character, Mills, ends up in the Cretaceous period. In the beginning, we see him on the beach with his wife and daughter, who is sick. He’s getting ready to go on a two-year mission, the money from which will help them out. But we’ve already been told that since the beginnings of life in the cosmos, travelers have gone exploring the cosmos, and the establishing shot of his planet does not say Earth. (That they speak English, and evolve very much like humanity is never really explored.) We don’t know what mission, exactly, he’s on, but his ship gets caught up in asteroid debris, and crash lands on Earth. He and a girl (Koa, played quite well by Ariana Greenblatt), and they must survive on this unknown (to them) planet, which has dinosaurs and other threats they must face.
This is a film that shines at 93 minutes; with as threadbare a premise as it had, pushing it further would have made it painful, after a certain time. The fact that we aren’t looking at “Jurassic Park” dinosaurs is gotten past right away, and the designs are pretty good, actually. Part of this film’s problem, however, is that the lighting by cinematographer Salvatore Totino (“Everest,” “Spider-Man: Homecoming”) is almost oppressively dark to the point of it being difficult to see anything on-screen. When the film seems to transition from dark to light within individual sequences, it is beautiful, but those moments are very few and far between here. That darkness leads to an almost deathly-serious tone for the drama, which isn’t inherently bad, but I was left feeling as though they could have done more to have fun with this premise- and the dinosaurs- without losing the film’s sense of drama. But Driver and Greenblatt make us interested in these characters, and want to see them survive.
I think Beck and Woods (who also wrote “A Quiet Place”) understand well the importance of certain elements in a film like this. They know that, if you’re basically going to do a mano-a-mano man vs. nature thriller, the “man” part of it should be intelligent enough to be able to outwit what its facing in nature, even if it isn’t imposing enough physically to take it on; in that way, Mills and Koa are very well-written archetypes. They understand that set pieces and moments are what is going to drive this film, although they don’t do enough with certain set piece possibilities here. And the film feels grounded in a physical reality, even if the philosophical reality laid out in the second paragraph doesn’t really make sense. Overall, “65” is a solid B-movie, although it’s one that you’d probably be fine waiting to watch at home, if only so you can turn on the brightness on your TV screen so you can see it.
