65 Movie Review

A spaceship pilot crash-lands on Earth 65 million years ago and must battle dinosaurs to escape the doomed planet in 65, a semi-lame but mildly entertaining sci-fi action flick starring Adam Driver and Ariana Greenblatt.

For those looking for nothing more than Adam Driver shooting dinosaurs, this $45-million-budgeted film will be enough. It doesn’t even pretend to be more sophisticated than that, and on those merits alone I give directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods credit for the execution at hand. While the visual effects don’t compare to other, bigger movies, they’re more than adequate here; in fact, Beck, Woods, and team do a fine job of making their world seem large and lived in.

On the flip side, 65 is so straightforward and streamlined it struggles to find much to bite into. Beck and Woods deliver a fair amount of action but miss the mark in terms of establishing a steady sense of suspense and terror; further, as a whole, there’s not a single moment that really stands out as something special or spectacular.

At a lean 93 minutes, I would have liked to see 65 be a bit more relentless–keep the story and action simple, but don’t allow your audience to even take a breath. I get why Driver was paired with another actor so he’d have someone to talk to, but one wonders what this movie could have been if he had gone this solo. The whole Newt from Aliens relationship comes off as a bit half-assed, and why they opted to have Greenblatt not speak the same language as Driver’s character is beyond me; it largely defeats the point of giving him a co-star.

65, for what it is, has its entertainment value and those who are content with a guy with a gun battling dinosaurs will find enough to appreciate here. But this movie had the potential to be more than what it was, and for that reason, it’s not quite worth the blast to the past.

Review by Erik Samdahl unless otherwise indicated.