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The new film 65 is set millions of years in the prehistoric past—and its ideas are only slightly younger. A mishmash of Predator, Aliens, and Jurassic Park that strands Adam Driver in the middle of a generic forest populated by third-rate CGI dinosaurs that are less authentic-looking than Spielberg’s 1993 T-Rexes and velociraptors, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ thriller is chintzy, lamebrained, and absurd.
Which isn’t to say that it’s devoid of pulpy pleasures.
65 is precisely the type of B-movie that should have been released during the summer, when it might have served as a refreshingly cheesy respite from the heat. The film, which hits theaters Mar. 10, concerns Mills (Driver), a pilot from the planet Somaris, which introductory text informs us—against a backdrop of computer-generated milky ways—was one of many intergalactic civilizations that existed long before man took his maiden steps out of the primordial soup. On this world, Mills and his wife Alya (Nika King) sit arm-in-arm on the beach watching their daughter Nevine (Chloe Coleman) stand at the edge of the water, trying to cup her hands together properly in order to whistle—a trick that her dad (who’s “good at everything”) can accomplish with ease.
This brief expository scene reveals that Mills is reluctantly accepting a two-year gig manning an exploratory flight so that he might earn enough to care for terminally ill Nevine, who understands why her dad is leaving but is still mad about it. Driver treats even this early going seriously, investing Mills with a measure of recognizable humanity that makes him worth rooting for once he embarks on his journey. That jaunt is rudely interrupted by an unexpected asteroid field that damages his ship, killing its many cryosleeping passengers and sending it hurtling to the nearest planet—which, unbeknownst to Mills, is Earth circa the Cretaceous Period. Seemingly all by himself, and with no radio that can successfully transmit an SOS, Mills quickly decides that suicide is his only reasonable option.
It’s no spoiler to inform you that Mills does not, ten minutes into the film, off himself, nor that—once he restores power to his severed-in-two craft—he deduces that there’s another survivor: a nine-year-old girl named Koa (Ariana Greenblatt), who speaks a foreign language. Struggling to bridge this communication gap, Mills convinces Koa to join him on a perilous trek to a mountaintop in order to reach the ship’s other half (and its escape pods) by promising to reunite her with her parents. This is a lie that will eventually lead to heartache, although if you think that Mills and Koa will fill the holes in their respective hearts by becoming a surrogate father-daughter pair, well, you’ve seen one of this sci-fi saga’s predecessors too.
As written and directed by Beck and Woods, the duo who co-wrote A Quiet Place, 65 races through its set-up for good reason—namely, it’s derivative, paper-thin, and doesn’t make much sense. Somaris’ people look, sound and behave an awful lot like you and me. Consequently, it’s never clear why the filmmakers—who were already pilfering past genre classics—didn’t just make Mills a futuristic human astronaut who accidentally traveled through time à la Charles Heston in Planet of the Apes. As it stands, the entire conceit is perplexing, and demands that one simply go with it—along with the suggested, equally half-baked notions that Driver is Prometheus (falling in fire from the heavens) and Jesus (courtesy of a wound in his side).
Koa bristles at her new protector, making goofy faces behind his back and threatening to disobey his orders to not eat poisonous berries. Nonetheless, as they traverse geyser-y hot springs, swampy marshes and scraggly ridges, she warms to him, even learning a few English (err, Somarian) words like “water,” “move” and, of course, “family.” 65 synthesizes various photocopied elements to create something distinctly unoriginal. Still, Beck and Woods competently play the hits, and their direction is thankfully free of unnecessary showiness. At least one of their jump scares lands, and Driver’s intensity is so great that it almost seems like Mills and Koa are really in do-or-die circumstances rather than riding the rails of a familiar Hollywood rollercoaster.
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At a hasty 92 minutes, 65 never crawls, and its set pieces are suitably loud and frantic. Their economy and cacophony, however, are not matched by their creativity. Mills’ scuffle with a dinosaur in a dark cave, Koa’s use of a hollow tree trunk to evade a pursuing beast, and a final showdown with multiple T-Rexes are all painfully rote. Worse, the ferocious creatures appear to have been based not on scientific models but on fantasy fiction. It’s inexplicable that a film with this premise would imagine dinosaurs in unrealistic ways, and yet here we are, with Mills and Koa battling giant salamander-like quadrupeds and dodging flocks of squawking avian monsters that would be far more at home in Avatar.
Despite these shortcomings, 65 knows it’s not charting unknown territory, and it delivers a series of encounters that keep the action’s engine humming. The daffiness of the entire enterprise winds up being its core strength, protecting it against critiques about its illogicality. Techno-devices magically purify water, laser guns never run out of energy, and separated shoulders are only fleeting injuries that can be shaken off as soon as immediate threats are neutralized. In almost every way, the proceedings resemble an impromptu game of make-believe concocted by a kid playing with his or her toys—a situation that renders it both inane and lighthearted.
When Koa spies a bright light shining in close proximity to the moon, 65 introduces a genuinely amusing the-sky-is-falling twist, and the way it subsequently uses it for race-against-the-clock suspense is nearly as hilarious. Without completely giving things away, Mills and Koa’s luck turns out to be even worse than they initially realized. The fact that Driver and Greenblatt maintain straight faces through to the end is not just impressive but admirable, and helps the film avoid falling into the wannabe-so-bad-it’s-good trap that’s sabotaged more than a few prior cinematic beasts, including the recent Cocaine Bear.
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