Adam Driver killing dinosaurs. If that doesn’t motivate you to watch this movie, I don’t know what will. 65 is a science fiction movie that follows Mills, a pilot that has a daughter that is sick. In order to provide the best treatment and life for her, he embarks on a job to transfer several cryogenically frozen humans. All was going well until he crash landed on a planet. That planet just so happens to be Earth 65 million years ago. What was on Earth at that time? Yup, dinosaurs. Now these just aren’t any ordinary dinosaurs. The director thought it would be a good idea to change them into more mutated beasts. Personally I wasn’t a huge fan of that and would rather see the historically accurate interpretation.
This movie had an extremely limited cast and after the first scene, there were only two characters for the rest of the movie, Mills and a child that also survived the crash. With the limited cast, the acting was excellent. Adam Driver performed great and Ariana Greenblatt, who plays Koa the survivor, was amazing. This makes up for the lack of a well written plot.
The story in 65 felt a little rushed at times. In one moment, he was in a certain place, and in the next scene he’s traveled to a brand-new location. It felt very discombobulated. There were times where I would wonder how Mills got to a certain point in the movie. It almost seemed like he knew the terrain like the back of his hand. One thing that I found interesting and that I think they did well was making Koa speak a different language and having that conflict that Mills had to address while trying to survive 50-foot monsters trying to kill him. It was emotional to see how Mills and Koa interacted and that he could see his own daughter in her and he was determined to get her home also.
One problem I had with this film was the lack of dinosaurs. The movie was advertised to be about Mills fighting dinosaurs all the time when there were actually 3 or 4 different kinds. The nerd in me wholeheartedly wished there was more of a variety. Throw a stegosaurus and triceratops in there for a few scenes.
Final Thoughts
Overall, 65 was solid with great acting but lacked in a few areas. It was a fun sci-fi flick that I would probably watch every so often but definitely not something I would go out of my way to see. The CGI was good enough and the sci-fi aspect was executed well with only a few flaws. Adam Driver is such an underrated actor and should be recognized more in future films.
