65 million years ago, mankind had already been traversing the cosmos for millennia, while Earth was a distant and unexplored planet that no one had ever heard of. 65 asks the question, what if our spacefaring progenitors crashed landed there and had laser guns to fend off dinosaurs while they tried to find a way off planet before the meteor that killed all of the dinosaurs crashed and killed everyone? Sounds like a lot of fun, doesn’t it? It’s not.

65

Adam Driver plays Mills, a space pilot whose work often takes him away from home for extended periods, leaving behind his wife and their ailing daughter. While piloting a craft full of cryogenically frozen people, his ship encounters an uncharted asteroid field, is struck, and crashlands on a prehistoric Earth. Now, he and the only other survivor of the crash, 9-year-old Koa, played by 15-year-old Ariana Greenblatt, have to survive the Cretaceous Period long enough to locate the wreckage of his craft and hope that the escape vessel within is still intact.

65 is a movie that seems like it’s ashamed to be what it is, a monster movie with a fun premise. It should deliver pulse pounding thrills and scares while taking the audience on an adventure that moves its protagonists from point A to point B before the clock runs out…or they get eaten.

While it does deliver one or two decent scares, it never fully commits. Instead, it tries too hard to be an introspective piece about a broken man who finds a way to let go of his pain and love again…in between shooting T-Rexes in the face with a laser rifle.

Unfortuneatly, the two don’t mesh well, and 65 suffers for it. Had there been more survivors that got winnowed away as the movie went on, perhaps it would have raised the stakes. Had they not waited until midway into the film to let the audience know what was going on emotionally with Mills, maybe we could have identified with him earlier and gone on the emotional ride with him. Had the writers forgone any of the needless subplots, perhaps the film would have been a much tighter and more focused thriller. Regrettably, none of that happened.

What did happen is that a guy who cannot miss a shot with his rifle that never runs out of ammo, and who can shake off deep abdominal wounds and dislocated shoulders, travels across some dangerous terrain with a girl whose language he doesn’t understand and can’t, therefore, communicate with.

The stakes never feel that high, the action never feels that exciting, and the premise is never fully realized.

WOKE ELEMENTS

What few co-stars the movie offers all check off Hollywood’s intersectional quota boxes.