Adam Driver stars as a spaceman whose ship crash lands on an uncharted planet. We soon learn that the mysterious planet is none other than our own and that the time is 65 million B.C. That means in order to survive, Adam has to fight off dinosaurs using space guns and shit.
An eight-year-old probably could’ve written 65. In fact, I’m sure that several thousand eight-year-olds have drawn pictures of spacemen fighting dinosaurs on the back of IHOP placemats in the midst of a sugar rush fueled by chocolate chip pancakes and Mountain Dew over the years. These drawings probably could’ve been used as storyboards for the movie. Sure, large portions of the film are pretty dumb, but that’s part of the charm. It speaks to the eight-year-old in all of us.
65 starts off like gangbusters, but it loses a little something when Driver finds a young girl (Ariana Greenblatt) he must protect from the prehistoric beasts. It’s here where it starts putting out After Earth kinds of vibes. That’s not a harsh criticism or anything because I don’t exactly hate that dorky movie. It’s just that the film worked better when Driver was… ahem… solo.
Written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, the team who wrote A Quiet Place, 65 never quite lives up to the potential that lies within its premise. (It needed one or two more dino battles for my tastes.) I will say it’s a big improvement over their previous directorial effort, the lame Haunt. It was also produced by none other than Sam Raimi. In fact, you almost wish he had helmed the film as Beck and Woods’ direction is competent but lacking pizzazz. To their credit, they keep the action moving and the breezy ninety-two-minute running time flies by. Driver is also to be commended for taking the potentially ridiculous premise as seriously as one could expect as he admirably sells his character’s predicament.
I liked Haunt better personally.
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