Have you ever wanted to see Adam Driver shoot some dinosaurs with a high-tech assault weapon? Well, for good measure, in 65 he also blows up a few dinosaurs with some tiny hand grenades.
Directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, 65 is based on the absurd premise that 65 million years ago, an alien from a faraway world crash-lands on Earth. Adam Driver and Arianna Greenblatt star in this very simplistic story: the pilot and a young girl, who are separated by a language barrier, crash 15 kilometers away from their escape vessel, and they must traverse the dinosaur-infested land to leave Earth before an asteroid – yes, that asteroid– crashes into their area.
There are no real characters or character development in 65. All we learn about Driver’s character is that he has a sick daughter back on his home planet, and Greenblatt’s character, the young girl who is stranded with him, doesn’t speak English, which doesn’t allow for a compelling relationship between the two. There nothing about the society that mastered interstellar travel or why the ship has a cargo of other people in stasis. We see almost nothing of the ship’s origins, and there is nothing remarkable about the group of beings that look and act just like humans, but are somehow not our ancestors.
That’s the best that I can say about 65’s plot: I feared that the film would do some Adam and Eve nonsense, and I was relieved when it did not go down that road even though so many questions about Driver’s character’s society remain unanswered.
The dinosaur thrills are bland besides three effective but ultimately cheap jump scares. Most of the dinosaurs do not act like predatory animals looking for food; they act like movie monsters who seek to trouble a movie’s main characters. And there is nothing clever about how the characters deal with the dinosaurs; it’s mostly Driver shooting, throwing grenades, and running away.
Ultimately, the question is do you want to see Adam Driver shoot some dinosaurs. And if the answer to that is yes, then that is all 65 has to offer.
