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’65’ Review: It’s Adam Driver versus Dinos, with unexpected charm

65
Sony Pictures

If January and August are when the months in which studios dump the product that they’re genuinely skeptical about yet contractually required to release, then March is the time that they toss out the high-concept genre stuff that might actually make a buck. If you look back over the release schedule over the years, you’ll find an interesting collection of bona fide hits (300, Limitless, Us), near-misses (Life, Repo Men, Noah, Battle: Los Angeles), and straight-up disasters (Sucker Punch, Chappie). It’s not quite summer, but it’s a time in which middling franchises prove particularly susceptible to original counterprogramming, and these bets do occasionally pay off. So when you’re confronted with a gap in the schedule, only occupied by another Scream sequel, it would make sense to slate the feature-film directing debut of Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, writers of high-concept spring mega-hit A Quiet Place, provided that they can come up with something as endearingly goofy as “aliens with giant ears and big-ass mouths attack Jim from The Office.” And boy howdy, have they come through with a whopper in 65, which is an endearing mash-up of classic prehistoric sci-fi cliche, survival thrills, and the “man and child on a mission” plot that’s proven to be so popular in recent months with viewers of The Last of Us. Importantly, it’s a two-hander, with Adam Driver playing the fatherly lead and Ariana Greenblatt as the girl he must protect from harm on the planet that they’ve crash-landed on.

That planet, of course, is Earth, back when dinosaurs could rule without the director of Gandhi bioengineering them. Driver plays Mills, a long-haul pilot cut from the same cloth as the space truckers of the Nostromo, who’s taken a gig staying awake and manning the controls while the scientific expedition he’s ferrying rests comfortably in cryosleep. It’s incredible that pre-Earth human civilizations capable of long-distance space travel still had to worry about whether or not they’ll be able to pay for their children’s healthcare, but that’s the situation that Mills finds himself in. But everything is thrown into chaos when a rogue meteor shower rips through the ship, and he’s forced to crash-land in The Land Before Time, some 65 million years before I sat down to type out this review (get it?). He quickly realizes just how fucked he is – it looks like every member of the expedition died, either from the ship breaking up upon entry to the atmosphere or the impact – and soon sets about trying to figure out if he should blow his brains sooner or later. He’s on an uncharted planet with little hope for survival, and it’s not clear if any of the escape vessels managed to emerge from the crash intact. But once he discovers that Greenblatt – the daughter of a pair of scientists and the lone child aboard the vessel – has somehow survived, he makes it his mission to find some way for the girl to get home. They don’t speak the same language, and communication proves nearly impossible. Still, once Mills confirms that one of the pods survived the crash – perched away on a nearby mountain ridge – they embark on a journey across a perilous landscape filled with odd bugs, quicksand, impassible terrain, and, of course, dinosaurs. Oh, and that meteor shower that hit the ship is also headed directly to Earth, so they better get there pretty fucking quick.

Like Ryan Gosling in last year’s The Gray Man, Driver’s an interestingly unstable element in a pretty traditional production. His strange fusion of neurotic energy and stoicism, as well as his overall oddness as a leading man, gives Mills a quality that’s difficult to characterize efficiently. His depression and bitterness remain wholly focused within, rather than on the girl, and the dad he was on his home planet can’t help but take over – he never sees her as a nuisance, but rather as his “warrant,” to paraphrase Cormac McCarthy in The Road. What emerges is a sort of gruff kindness that gives 65 its “I may have saved her, but she saved me tone but prevents it from descending into a treacly hell of boring sentiment. It helps that the whole “popping sci-fi caps into various dinosaurs” aspect of the film is also pretty well-rendered, and as much as I lamented the absence of any sort of really cool future tech or world-building, the budgetary limitations imposed mean that the dino-battle sequences are able to benefit from the full dedication of the film’s resources. There’s a really fun action scene in which Mills, trapped underground, has to fight off a cave-dwelling dinosaur, with half of the action unfolding on his  tricorder-like device as it beams small figures of the combatants in some sort of “proximity mode.” Then there’s the final confrontation with the large creatures – I want to call them T.Rexs, but I can’t tell one giant dinosaur from the Marc Bolans of the Jurassic – which sees a number of the threads left untied fused together in satisfying fashion.

Aside from that lack of imagination (and one could assume that the premise alone in its high-concept glory sucked up much of the brainpower), there’s plenty that holds 65 back from being as interesting or as compelling as it could be, though it never quite manages to overwhelm the good. Mills’ backstory is sloppily rendered in a way that deprives the film of some subtlety, with a lengthy prologue devoted to showing him at home on not-Caladan with his wife and child, preparing to kick off his journey, and as the film progresses, it really might have served it better if some manner of mystery assisted the heartstrings-tugging. Beck and Woods want you to know that the man is a saint from the beginning, and perhaps grounding the film in a more even-handed perspective, with the audience not being wholly sure of whether or not the girl (and they) should trust him, might have added an additional layer of suspense.

Likewise, not enough time is devoted to the girl, which makes sense given the language barrier, but it’s somewhat understandable given Driver’s star wattage and the directors’ commitment to pace above anything else. That speed is an asset, but it also makes those few moments in which the film pauses for a breath feel kind of awkward and out of place. Then there’s the matter of the timing of their crash-landing – of course they’re stranded there in the hours before Earth takes one on the chin from a Texas-sized asteroid, with no reptilian Bruce Willis or Robert Duvall to try and nuke the thing to oblivion – as well as the very silly title screen, which restates the film’s entire promotional tagline in the clumsiest way possible, as if it had been lifted straight from the concept reel made for their pitch.

Yet 65 is charming in a way that a lot of its genre-and-release-dated siblings aren’t quite able to reach. Perhaps this is because Beck and Woods have established themselves as the Dad-centric world of high-concept sci-fi’s most bankable creators, and it’s astonishing how outright sentimental this movie can be from time to time. But plenty of moments where I would have started cringing out of my skin – such as when the girl picks a flower for Mills to wear in his hair and he begrudgingly agrees to – are made amusing and/or manage to connect because of Driver’s screen presence. Though subtlety really isn’t the film’s strong suit, there is a sensitively-handled existential crisis at the root of his character – he has nothing left to live for, and is confronted with the purposeless of his life only to find it endowed with unexpected meaning. The pair could have chosen to play these moments with some amount of sappy music and tinny dialogue. Still, it’s left chiefly unstated, with Driver letting the character’s evolution show through his actions and expressions rather than with a heavy-hand.

So 65 might not be the kind of high-concept meme movie worth screeching loudly about to your friends – there’s no Cocaine Bear cred here, really – but it is a decently solid time at the movies, as long as you’re willing to accept the dumb and open your heart up far enough for a Hallmark-styled The Grey but with dinosaurs instead of wolves.