Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, the writers behind A Quiet Place and writers/directors of Haunt, seek to resuscitate the long-dormant horror adventure of yesteryear with 65, complete with survival elements, hostile creatures on a foreign planet, and even deadly quicksand. Only the foreign planet is Earth, 65 million years ago, and the hostile creatures are indigenous dinosaurs. That’s terrible news for a pair of travelers who’ve crash landed there. All of that should make for a feature far more thrilling than it is.
65 opens with a serene beach scene far from Earth to introduce Mills (Adam Driver), a man grappling with accepting a pilot job that will keep him from his family for two years. The position is necessary; Mills needs the money to pay for his sickly daughter Nevine (Chloe Coleman) to get the medical treatment she desperately needs. Completing his mission proves far more complicated than imaginable when an undocumented asteroid causes a meteor shower, crashing his ship. Only Mills and a young girl, Koa (Ariana Greenblatt), survive. They’ll have to overcome language barriers, the elements, prehistoric predators, and more in their quest for survival.
The high concept genre adventure quickly settles into a pattern after establishing the emotional stakes for both Mills and Koa. Mills is determined to get Koa to their destination, no matter how much Koa lacks self-preservation instincts. It creates a repetition as the pair traverse the terrain, encountering predators, and evading them, with Mills often dragging Koa from the brink of becoming a meal, then taking a bit to recover and get their bearings again before continuing. Writer/Directors Beck and Woods spend more time in the lulls between the action, attempting to give their characters enough room to build a rapport and make the audience care about their predicament. That means that while there is a welcome variety to the species on the prowl, the action comes in bursts.
Those quieter stretches see Driver and Greenblatt working overdrive to inject pathos into thinly sketched characters. Sporadic attempts at humor feel out of place amidst the serious tone as the narrative tries to shoehorn this unlikely duo into a familial bond. Driver and Greenblatt mostly succeed thanks to their natural charisma, which becomes handy when Koa’s lackadaisical behavior nearly gets her killed for the umpteenth time. The switch from helpless damsel into shaky survivor comes too abrupt.
Not helping the repetitive structure, aside from the slugging valleys against the action-heavy peaks, is a muddied sense of place. Mills relies on tech to guide him, but for a viewer, it’s tough to gauge where they’re going, let alone where they’ve been. Once darkness enters the equation, it becomes almost impossible to distinguish even the action. An extended sequence in a pitch-black cave loses all suspense when you’re squinting to make out what’s happening on screen, and frantic camerawork further obscures the dinosaur action.
It’s the seriousness that unmoors a lot of what works about 65. Pale echoes of retro films like Planet of Dinosaurs get teased throughout but never fully embraced. The resurgence of quicksand as a lethal trap, early dinosaur encounters, and a gruesome nighttime parasite ensure it’s entertaining enough. Driver makes for a formidable action lead worth watching, too. But the potential for what could’ve been had 65 fully embraced the absurdities of its plot is what lingers once it’s over.
65 is out in theaters now.
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