65

• Written and Directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods
• March 10, 2023

A long time ago in a galaxy not far away at all a pilot crashes on prehistoric Earth and attempts to escape with the only other survivor.

Every now and then today a studio releases in theaters a movie that’s clearly not a safe bet. It’s an oddball idea that one would expect to find on a streaming service like Netflix or Prime with little to no fanfare given to it.

Into this pantheon enters 65-a good movie with an incredibly bad title. The first mistake this movie made was calling itself ‘65’. It’s a confusing title to market even though it’s directly connected to the film. 65 what? Once you understand what’s going on in the movie it makes perfect sense but a great deal is given away then. Star Wars is about a war in the stars and you get that pretty easy without knowing any real story. That’s easy to market. Raiders of the Lost Ark at least implies some kind of adventure. How do you market 65 without giving it all away?

This also feels like a one-off adventure in an already developed fictional universe. Scott Beck and Bryan Woods appear to think we should know all the dynamics and functionality of this world. That includes why there are humans from another planet in prehistory. Without knowing anything it feels very shallow.

65 stars Adam driver as spaceship pilot Mills who hauls scientists and what not from one side of the galaxy to the other. The film opens with a flashback (though not revealed immediately) of Mills having to leave his ill daughter behind for a long trip whose pay will cover her treatments. If you don’t realize what’s going on the rest of the story in that bit within the first minute or two I cannot help you.

Long story short on his most recent trip he encounters a rogue bit of space debris and finds himself crash landed on a mysterious planet which happens to be Earth 65 million years ago. If you can’t figure out where this is going once you figure that out I can’t help you here either.

This is a survival story where Mills must get himself and a young girl to an escape vessel. Our two mains have a language barrier which they overcome and bond through during the course of the film. It’s the standard learning to live again type story-with dinosaurs! Mills is a bit of a cold jerk and his unwanted charge Koa (Ariana Greenblatt) takes the place of his daughter.

While that spaceship was really cool I wanted to see more dinosaurs. We got some but not nearly enough and this might be the nerd in me, but now that it’s been shown many if not all dinosaurs had feathers or some kind of covering I’m not sure why we didn’t see a few like that. Then again, given the environment in which this occurred it might be safe to assume that they were just hairless.

The dinosaurs are a bit bland, and it’s difficult to tell the difference. While the pterosaurs have unique features and get some kind of coloring the dinosaurs that come after Mills and Koa have nothing too distinct about them. We get an Oviraptor and a Tyrannosaurus Rex but their overall designs lack distinction. They have gone the bland elephant shin gray appearance.

When it comes down to it, 65 is not a bad movie, but it is not a movie that deserved to see actual release. It’s just a fun movie with an oddball concept, but in today’s market it’s not one of those things that plays well with the audience. Mix in an apparently established world that the audience is never let in on and it makes it difficult to connect with the characters or story. You will not be bored but that may not be enough.