"65" - All I want is dinosaurs with feathers

Josh
Oct 14, 2024
5 min read

Scott Beck; Bryan Woods (2023)

65 Million Years in the making for this?

It’s been 31 years at the time of writing this since the first Jurassic Park movie hit the silver screens in 1993. That movie inspired and revived a whole new generation of palaeontologists, advancing research and theories towards these million year old creatures. And despite all my issues with this mediocre movie, the most distracting thing for me was the fact the dinosaurs still did not have feathers. Even in the early 1990’s before the first Jurassic Park it was theorised that dinosaurs were closer relatives to modern birds. And like Jurassic World Dominion, I sighed and cringed at the sight of these giant kindergarten-science lizards acting like intelligent moustache twirling villains rather than animals. And here with 65 it feels like they were more focused on following the continued lizard trend revived by the Jurassic World series, than taking a step into the modern interpretation. And when your whole movie revolves around dinosaurs, it’s something you would want to get right. But when you can’t get that right, at least the movie could be entertaining, right? You’ve got a concept for The Asylum with one of the greatest B-Movie directors (Sam Rami) producing the film, it should’ve been a riot? Well, it may have been if the movie embraced Raimi’s camp especially during his Evil Dead 2 or Army of Darkness era because this movie was a snore-fest and a wasted concept.

So based on the premise of “Adam Driver fights dinosaurs with guns”, you probably think there would be an element of time travel involved. That was my first thought but instead we get a cliché that I cannot stand in movies. So Mills (Adam Driver) and his family (Chloe Coleman, Nika King) are actually an advanced race of aliens on a far distant star system that just happen to look exactly like humans that just so happen to crash into Earth 65 million years ago. But when we introduce Earth years before humanity was a group of chimps, I just think, “Oh boy, what a massive coincidence that we evolved to function exactly the same as those aliens with a different sized sun and ecosystem. Oh, and lucky they can speak English, too.” At least Star-Trek made characters blue. And I can forgive something like Star Wars because Earth is just never mentioned. So I honestly would’ve preferred just an element of time travel as there is little reason to actually make them alien other than they have some smarter tech. While we’re on the topic of clichés I’m dead sick of in movies, especially sci-fi, I hate when they have a vehicle with an AI that will explain exactly what’s happening to the audience that should be obvious via visuals. But they don’t appear for all pieces of tech, just the ones that need to explain some exposition to the audience. Think 2001: A Space Odyssey, they have some complex ship mechanics but show it wish visuals. This movie, thinks you're a dumbass.

So if the movie treats you like a part of the drooling smooth brain populous, then hopefully the story can entertain that part of your psyche, right? Well, the plot itself is rather simple. After going through an asteroid belt and crashing onto Earth, the two surviving victims, Mills and Koa (Ariana Greenblatt), need to get to a part of the ship that has the item they need to escape. Which is nothing remarkable but if the plot is simple, then you want the dynamic between the two to be interesting and the journey exciting. We are greeted with nether. The chemistry between the characters is pretty slim, like the recent The Last of Us TV show, 65 attempts to hit father daughter themes. We see some pretty corny editing sequences of Mill’s biological daughter go from cheerful to angry within a montage. To redeem that relationship, he reluctantly takes Koa under his wing to get off Earth and back to their home. And all of their lies and early conflicts are extremely obviously set up and resolved exactly when you expect them to be resolved. Like the cliché of a character tricking another with a promise to get them to go along with a plan, only to have the lie reveal itself at the end of the second act. So nothing feels natural, it’s just moments of the script playing out when they have to. While trying to and give emotion to their relationship, they have silly moments playing out with silly music over the top, bland generic tense music when the characters are ‘in danger’ so nothing felt natural or earnt.

Okay, okay. So the movie thinks you're a clown and the dynamic between our main characters isn’t engaging or interesting, but how about their journey? Well, if you’ve seen any movie you can tell exact points when an action scene will play out, how they will play out and even how the second act low point and final act will play out. They’re unoriginal with the dinosaurs they use for action scenes, again copying Jurassic Park utilising raptor-like creatures wherever they can. But I say raptor-like because they didn’t use real dinosaurs at all, just monsters that take the silhouette of a dinosaur. Reminding me of the parody that was the Indominus Rex from Jurassic World, just something extreme and new because the cretaceous period is so 66 million years ago. Now I will give the movie a bit of credit here. The asteroid belt they went through at the start of the movie is the extinction level event that wiped out life on Earth. I thought that was a pretty decent attempt at a ticking clock element. So during the climax as chunks of the meteorite are hitting sides of the mountains, nothing feels impactful. Even as they land right near them, they make a small dust cloud when even those lesser rocks would destroy the area they’re in. We watch these dinosaurs, sorry monster reptiles, attack their ship for some reason. Again, removing their animalistic impulses makes them less interesting because they act like they have motivation for stopping them attempting to leave the planet?

Now this is me giving the movie a bit too much credit because I thought I knew where it was going. I thought we would get a predictable noble sacrifice from Mills to save Koa and then upon his death, his skeleton would be unearthed as Omo 1. But no, there is zero tension during the climax because you know exactly what beats and what set-ups are returning and then the movie ends. And I sat there looking at the screen wondering why I watched the full thing.

I’ve sadly got very little positive to say about this movie. The positive I can think of is that I thought it was a mildly clever setup that the asteroid that destroyed their ship was the one that will wipe out goliaths that roamed the world. I would describe this movie as unenthusiastic. Like it had a premise but no one really felt excited to make it. Like they couldn’t figure out how to make it work so they took the most inoffensive, tame, middle of the road route from one half of a crashed ship to the other. I didn’t feel like I was watching characters trying to escape a tough situation, I didn’t believe anything that was happening. I was constantly reminded, “this is a movie”. I would say this should be extinct with the dinosaurs but none of these dinosaurs even existed in the first place.