I think a lot of movie fans and commentators take for granted the success of the Jurassic World movies. Generally dismissed as quality movies though they may be, the first and third especially were major box office hits, the former being the eighth highest grossing movie of all time and the latter the third highest grossing movie of 2022. Dinosaurs, even thinly rendered CGI ones, are popular with audiences. But outside of the Jurassic franchise nobody has really tried to make a big budget movie with dinosaurs -largely I suspect because the action that would necessitate a human component requires certain broad leaps of plotting there’s no guarantee an audience would be on board for. To not look like a total conceptual rip-off of the Jurassic movies, it’s either got to involve time travel or aliens (or just be another adaptation of The Lost World).
65 goes for the latter, envisioning a technologically advanced humanoid civilization on another planet around the time the dinosaurs ruled this earth. And wouldn’t you know it, on what seems to be a charter expedition one of their spaceships collides with heavy asteroid debris and crash-lands on Earth, killing everyone but the pilot and one young passenger now forced to survive and find a way off this dinosaur-infested rock. It’s directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, writers of A Quiet Place, and certainly bears several of that movie’s signatures -in that broad apocalyptic-adjacent concept and probably most notably in a penchant for jump scares. In the directors chair themselves though, they prove a perhaps underwritten competence in John Krasinski, as without him they are largely rudimentary in their approach to the action-horror elements. No jump scare is in any way exciting if there’s not a sufficient atmosphere around it.
There’s a startling lack of creativity to its narrative and its world too that is almost certainly less to do with Beck and Woods’ input as it is general product strategy. I mean it wouldn’t hit those desired Jurassic franchise sweet spots if the main character “alien” was a ten foot tall translucent Martian with antennae and three digits on each hand. I’ll grant that the introduction of diverse languages within this civilization which makes for a communication obstacle between the two protagonists is interesting and novel; but the fact that this highly evolved ancient alien race is visibly, tangibly human by all other conceivable metrics is just dull. Adam Driver plays a character, a member of a supposedly far-advanced interstellar species, called Mills, and his weapon of choice is just a generic sci-fi laser gun. The basics of sociology, biology, technology all easily correspond to modern American counterparts and it’s a failure of imagination the whole way through.
Mills’ relationship with the girl Koa (Ariana Greenblatt) only accentuates this, a typical pairing that rarely transcends its simplest structural functions. Her defining character trait is wanting to find her family, though the certainty of their death leaves little to invest in as she and Mills journey towards the back half wreckage of the ship and their only way off planet. He meanwhile is saddled with some drama around his daughter, whom Koa quickly becomes a surrogate of, and who may die of an illness before he gets home. This too plays out drearily, through a series of tritely sentimental videos and holographic messages that cheaply endeavour to buff up the stakes by implying a greater severity than is either earned or followed through on. Driver and Greenblatt make do with the material but it’s not anywhere interesting enough to convincingly convey a meaningful surrogate relationship, especially as the script resorts to filling it out with false alarm perils and misunderstandings as a device for conflict.
All the movie has going for it is its action, and Beck and Woods know it. Around every corner they position a dinosaur attack, and yet most of these can’t conjure much excitement. Virtually all of the creatures Mills and Koa come into contact with are fast, carnivorous, and deadly -unspecified but for a few tyrannosaur-like giants. There is no curiosity or specificity to them, they are mere horror monster drones; and in their deployment the directors are overly reliant on conventional jump-scare tactics to illicit tension, and treading in the footsteps of the Jurassic movies in the composition of the action, compared to which 65 has no sequence that is interesting or original. An apex predator corners the pair in a rain-swept cave, the saving of a juvenile proves hazardous, two great therapods attack their vehicle as they try to escape. The one pretty good original set-piece is a dry desolation of acid geysers that makes an appearance early on, and that even the filmmakers must realize was pretty neat as they return to it in the climax (in spite of the amount of ground covered by the protagonists since then) for the final confrontation between man (or man-alien) and beast.
And this of course happens against the backdrop of the great Cretaceous extinction event, which is enacted as a ticking clock for the heroes to get off planet in perhaps the movie’s most overt bit of grandiose cheese (the film hilariously cuts to the asteroid a few times as a reminder of its imminence). The movie was already operating from a place of silliness masquerading as something of substance, but this element takes it over the top in a way that feels less thrilling than it is obvious and dull. Of course this was where it was going to end, why wouldn’t it? The extinction climax is just the broadest of several ways 65 misunderstands the inherent dumbness of its premise and irrelevance of its tone. The title card on both the poster and in the movie itself comes as a preface to the phrase “…million years ago, prehistoric Earth had a visitor”, and yet still it seems to think it can take itself seriously as a thriller-horror movie. It’s ending basically plays as Armageddon trying to be Aliens.
65 is a movie that has hardly anything going for it beyond its central nifty idea. In spite of its intentions to lean more into the horror of the premise, rarely does it offer anything that isn’t a shadow of something from a Jurassic franchise or other like B-movie entry. Dinosaurs are very cool and it would be a shame for them to be confined to just one ultimately mediocre film series the way pirates have been for the last couple decades. But if those with creative power in Hollywood can’t come up with anything more than a hollow pitch like this movie is, maybe they are better staying extinct.
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