REVIEW: 65 (2023)

Movie Reviews

65 feels like someone involved – or perhaps everyone – had no faith in it. It’s a rushed, disjointed, anorexic outline of what could have been a good, or even great, sci-fi adventure. It mostly looks good, and Adam Driver and Ariana Greenblatt wring what they can out of the scraps they’re afforded, but the heart and soul of the film have been removed, if they were ever there at all.

Mills (Adam Driver), an interstellar transportation pilot, is flying a ship through space on a two-year trip when his vessel is caught in an asteroid belt and crashes on a strange planet. As the trailers have revealed, Mills is on Earth 65 million years ago, when dinosaurs reigned and danger lurked around every rock, tree, and tar pit. When he discovers the only other survivor of the accident, a young girl named Koa (Ariana Greenblatt), he determines to find a way home.

Almost everything wrong with 65 stems from its opening ten or fifteen minutes. This section should have set the stage for the rest of the movie; the tone, the characters and their relationships, the ship and its technology, the purpose of the trip, and pretty much everything else we need to know should have come here. But it’s over seemingly as soon as it begins, with a ridiculously fast pace that moves like a “previously on” segment before a TV episode in the middle of a season. We’re told the bare minimum needed to understand the basic setup, and that’s it. Mills’ family situation is given the most time – perhaps three whole minutes – but even this is insufficient for some of the drama that follows.

How about a tour of the ship? How about a look at the technology Mills has at his disposal? How about at least one scene where Mills meets the passengers aboard the ship or where they interact with each other so that their deaths mean something? How about telling us why Mills is taking them wherever they’re going? I understand the desire to move things along at a clip, but much of this can be done economically in a scene or two. Have Mills give the passengers a tour of the vessel while he explains the safety measures and tech to them, getting to know each one as they move through the various rooms. Even knowing why they’re going on the trip would reveal something about them. This isn’t difficult to figure out; it’s basic storytelling.

Knowing about the tech would come in handy because Mills seems to have the right tool for every occasion in his utility belt. 65 is ostensibly a story about survival in a rough alien terrain, a setting tailor-made for inventive solutions to unforeseen problems. But instead of, say, making weapons out of the nature that surrounds him or adapting to his environment to keep himself and Koa alive, Mills just whips out whatever Q-Branch gadget he needs for a given situation, be it marble-sized grenades, a thermos that can tell you if berries are poisonous, a holographic device that can visualize anything coming towards him, enough motion sensors to surround him and Koa as they sleep, and some kind of pulse rifle that kills dinosaurs dead. It seems strange to say it this way, but the many sci-fi gadgets actually demonstrate a lack of imagination.

Maybe that’s because so little thought went into the plot or characterizations. 65 knows what it wants Mills’ personality and arc to be, but it doesn’t lay enough groundwork to get him there. We’re never drawn in, never allowed to feel like we know Mills or sympathize with him. There are essential pieces of information to understand why Mills makes certain seemingly drastic decisions or why he’s so keen to save Koa that are either hidden or glossed over as the movie rushes forward. Even his developing camaraderie with Koa feels forced because it’s so truncated, like someone keeps hitting the skip button on the DVD remote. One important scene between the two ends abruptly just when a new stage in their relationship should be forming, so we have to take it on faith that she understands what we assume he probably said.

There are a few attempts to humanize Mills and Koa as 65 progresses, small, humorous moments when Koa acts silly and gets Mills to lighten up for a moment. But this is another casualty of the abbreviated opening. The tone of the film has been so serious to this point that when these lighthearted bits occur, they don’t fit, seemingly coming out of nowhere to give us a laugh. And they could have worked – could even have been important scenes – but the occasional shift in tone is never established. The opening could have fixed this by having some funny moments amid the drama to set this tone, preparing us for the occasional dip into comedy. Instead, it’s just another element thrown at the wall to see if it sticks.

This is why I said it feels like someone important had no faith in this movie. One of two things is true about 65: either it was poorly conceived from the beginning, slapped together by people who don’t much care about it or aren’t very talented, or it was a much better movie that the directors were forced to cut down to the bone by some suit who didn’t think anyone would want to watch it unless it moved faster than a bullet train. Since this is a neat concept, and writers-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods wrote A Quiet Place, which was very good (albeit rewritten by John Krasinski), I’m betting on the latter. It’s a real shame if that’s the case, and a good example of corporate thinking derailing art.

That isn’t to say nothing about 65 is good, though. There are certain scenes that work on their own, almost like vignettes separate from the whole. A sequence in a cave is quite suspenseful, with a jump scare that actually works and a growing sense of unease as the danger mounts. While some of the special effects fall short – the dinosaurs don’t always look real – some of them are excellent, particularly an epic depiction of gaseous space formations in the opening. The music is pretty good, appropriately ominous and energetic when it needs to be either; the light, comedic pieces are as jarring as their accompanying scenes, though. And Adam Driver and Ariana Greenblatt work overtime to make up for the script’s deficiencies, or the deficiencies created by studio meddling, as the case may be, giving Mills and Koa personalities through looks and vocal tics. 65 could have been so much more than it is.