Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Scott Beck, Bryan Woods
Starring: Adam Driver, Ariana Greenblatt, Chloe Coleman, Nika King
There's a phenomenon in team sports that sees a player's status become
elevated not by their performances but by their absence through injury.
Many players are taken for granted because they don't do the flashy
stuff, but take them out of the team and you suddenly realise the value
of their contribution. The same is often true of filmmakers.
65 comes from Scott Beck and Bryan Woods,
the writers of
A Quiet Place. With this one they've opted to co-direct themselves, and watching
them struggle to create anything close to the tense set-pieces of
A Quiet Place makes you realise just what a great job John
Krasinski did in directing that movie.
65 sees Beck and Woods fashion another sci-fi survival
thriller, one with a hell of a premise. 65 million years ago an
astronaut crash lands on Earth. It's the age of the dinosaurs and the
asteroid that famously wiped them out is about to hurtle down to Earth
in the next couple of days. Can the astronaut make his way across
treacherous, dino-riddled terrain to an escape shuttle before the planet
is destroyed? Sounds like a winner, right? And yet somehow Beck and
Woods have managed to take this exciting concept and turn it into a
mind-numbingly dull experience.
The astronaut in question is Adam Driver's Mills. In the opening
sequence we see him say goodbye to his sickly daughter (Chloe Coleman) as he sets off on a two-year mission piloting a spacecraft to the far
reaches of the galaxy. He's taken the task because his wages will pay
for the treatment his daughter needs to save her life. When the craft
runs into an asteroid storm Mills is forced to crash on a nearby planet.
The reveal that this planet is Earth is done in the laziest manner
possible, literally spelled out in onscreen text, an early sign that
we're not in the most creative hands here.
Mills discovers that there is one surviving passenger, Koa (Ariana Greenblatt), a young girl who can't speak English. Mills lies to Koa that her
parents are alive atop the distant mountain where the escape shuttle has
somehow managed to land intact, and so the two set off on a dangerous
journey.
Beck and Woods struggle to make said journey anywhere as scary, tense
or exciting as it should be. From the off they face the problem of the
audience knowing that Koa isn't in any real peril because we know a
movie like this isn't going to kill the kid (unlike
A Quiet Place, which killed a kid in the opening scene, thus making us feel anyone
could potentially die at any point). And in order for Koa to survive,
Mills needs to stay alive to pilot the escape shuttle, so we know he's
not in any danger either. But the main issue here is the lack of
engaging set-pieces (It's annoying that the very cinematic
Prey
went straight to streaming while this clogs up cinema screens). The
dinosaurs, which are barely glimpsed, particularly in the film's murky
night sequences, never feel like a real threat. Every time Mills finds
himself in danger he suddenly remembers he's carrying a bag full of
grenades, and the result is more akin to watching a well-armed hunter
downing lions on an African safari than a human struggling to evade
man-eating dinosaurs.
Driver and Goldblatt have some nice chemistry, and the latter is
particularly adept at conveying a lot of emotion without words. Their
efforts to polish a turd just leave them covered in shit however, and I
suspect both actors will be keen to wash the stench of this production
off their respective CVs. Once again Hollywood has done the impossible
and made dinosaurs boring.
