‘65’ Is ‘The Last of Us’ With Adam Driver, Dinosaurs, and Zero Thrills
Attention, anyone who’s ever said they’d gladly watch Adam Driver in anything: You’re about to have that statement put to the test.
65 pits our man Adam against a host of nearly insurmountable obstacles, ranging from rogue meteor showers to roving packs of predators to a script that runs the gamut from rookie-move bad to ridiculous — and not in that order, danger-wise. Driver is Mills, a spaceship pilot who’s pulled duty on a long transport flight and soon finds himself marooned on a mysterious planet that turns out to be inhabited by giant, toothsome creatures. He’s joined by the only other survivor of the crash, a young woman named Koa (Ariana Greenblatt). She’s from “the Northern territories” on his planet — one that, judging from flashbacks, is apparently filled with beaches used in Cialis ads — which means that she doesn’t understand English. She does have a family back home, however, and given that Mills’ heavy-handed backstory is brimming with parental guilt, he’s determined to find the working half of their ship and skedaddle. The duo just have to avoid hungry beasties and climb to the top of a mountain several dozen miles away.
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The “twist” is, Mills has actually landed on Earth during the Cretaceous Period, and those monsters are dinosaurs. The title refers to how many million years ago Mills landed on our big blue marble. It also happens to be a larger number than the amount of minutes it takes for you to completely lose your patience with this mess. Can’t that ominous comet they keep cutting to in the sky — you know the one — come any sooner?
Seriously, with a pulpy, days-of-future-past premise like this, you expect the cinematic equivalent of a vintage Ballantine paperback cover: raptors, rayguns, a square-jawed hero ready for action. Driver, to his credit, can strike those types of poses in front of green screens in his sleep, but not even his broadest of broad shoulders can hold something this slapdash up. Writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods know their extraterrestrials, stalk-and-chase scenes, and high concepts — they cowrote the screenplay for A Quiet Place — but there’s a curious lack of energy in what they’ve concocted here. Mills and Koa encounter the occasional running, leaping, jaw-snapping dinosaurs, along with gooey bugs, quicksand pools and cave-ins, yet it feels like they’re just skipping from one perilous incident to the next with no real momentum. Even a long-teased showdown between Driver and two T. Rex’s fizzles before it can catch fire.
And even if 65 didn’t have the misfortune of coming on the heels of The Last of Us’ first season, the idea of this father figure leading a surrogate daughter to safety doesn’t have quite the emotional drive here that it needs to either rocket past plot holes or the nagging sense of overfamiliarity. As for the Chariots of the Gods notion of “alien” visitors landing on our prehistoric shores with futuristic technology, any potential for exploiting that age-old myth in the name of B-movie thrills goes the way of the ammonites. It’s not schlocky enough to be so-bad-it’s-good and nowhere near good enough to be taken even a tiny bit seriously.
The good news is that this is far from an extinction-level event for the A-list talent here; Driver may be forced to push this plodding sci-fi misfire along, but given how he’s survived white supremacists, rebel forces, noble-failure literary adaptations and the sixth season of Girls, he can recover from this. The bad news is that even those of us who love the actor’s work may find ourselves wondering why he said yes to this in the first place. Put it you this way: This is a movie in which Adam Driver, Movie Star, fights a bunch of dinosaurs. And long before the film’s abrupt excuse for an ending drops, you will find yourself rooting for the dinosaurs.
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