Mark Reviews Movies: 65

65, Sony Pictures Releasing

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 10, 2023

The foundational premise of 65 is pure simplicity: A man finds himself stranded in a strange place and must find a way to escape. However, the specific details of co-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods' screenplay give this movie its potential. The filmmakers, unfortunately, cease their ambitions with the gimmicky nature of that potential.

The thrust of it is that the movie is set in pre-history, although one wouldn't know it except for some opening text that seems to have been insisted upon by some impatient or skeptical studio executive. Beck and Woods' visuals sell us some kind of futuristic, science-fiction adventure, as the camera moves through a spiral galaxy, passing by and through various nebulas on a course toward a planet. Is this our galaxy, and have we arrived at our own planet at some point in the distant future?

It would seem that way, since Mills (Adam Driver) is spending time with his wife (played by Nika King) and daughter (played by Chloe Coleman) before taking a two-year-long expeditionary mission into space. Forget the mystery, though, because the move immediately informs us that we are in the distant past, "before mankind," so the appearance of very mankind-looking characters on this not-Earth planet raises plenty more questions than the mystery of what's happening would have.

If these are aliens relative to our species, isn't it cosmically coincidental that these non-human creatures look exactly like humans? Isn't it improbably convenient that they speak English? If—as the movie will soon make clear—these aliens are capable of interstellar travel and have discovered Earth, are they our ancestors, or wouldn't they at least make additional trips to our planet in the ensuing eons?

None of this really matters to the story, which is as simple as can be, despite the presence of intergalactic travel, as well as at least some level of additional futuristic-but-not-technically-so technology, such as blaster rifle that don't seem to have ammunition—but do happen to run out of it just at the worst moment—and marble-sized grenades that pack a big punch. It's just to say that Beck and Woods probably wanted the fact that this story is set 65 million years in the past to be a bit of a surprise, when the title and that information are revealed about 15 minutes into the movie, but someone went ahead and messed up the punch line.

The plot, though, has Mills crash-landing on Earth, in that long-ago past when dinosaurs are the dominant species. Mills is carrying passengers on this trek, but an unexpected cluster of asteroids wreaks havoc on his ship, leaving him with only one surviving passenger. She's Koa (Ariana Greenlatt), a 9-year-old girl (Are years on their planet, in yet another galactically unlikely coincidence, the same length as ours, too?), who doesn't speak not-English-even-if-it-sounds-exactly-like-it. Mills, who is very sad about his daughter (who coughs just as he mentions she's sick in the prologue), is determined to bring this girl home.

Driver might be one of the better and more distinctive actors in the movies today, but no one would be able to determine that from this movie alone. He's very determined, staring at mysterious landscapes and vistas and creatures as he and girl journey to the only surviving escape pod, and very melancholy, staring at those things with watery eyes, in this role. This is a character, though, who exists to stare and to trek, as well as to run and to shoot on occasion, and very little more.

The running and shooting are from and at various dinosaurs, which sometimes look vaguely right, especially since a lot of the bigger action sequences take place in the dark, and often appear off in design (the oversized heads), execution (There's good reason for the more significant setpieces to take place in the dark, where we won't notice the shortcuts as much), or both (They give the impression that a different effects house was responsible for each species). Despite the fact that an ancient alien evading and battling dinosaurs on a prehistoric Earth sounds like a pretty neat concept for a movie, Beck and Woods don't give us much of that. When they do embrace that silly but tantalizing idea, the filmmakers either cut those sequences short or, again, obscure them in cost-cutting darkness.

65 lacks a lot, to be sure. It would be easier to forgive its lapses in logic and character, however, if it wasn't lacking the one thing that really matters for material like this: some degree of imagination beyond the premise.

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