Movie Review: 65 (PG13 - 93 minutes)

I love a good dinosaur movie – the problem is, they are few and far between.  As both a positive and negative, the Jurassic Park franchise has spoiled audiences with really fantastic practical dinosaur effects mixed with near-flawless CGI dinosaurs. That sets the bar really high for anything else promising dinosaur action.

65 tells the story of Mills, a pilot with a loving wife and ailing daughter.  In order to get the money they need for her very expensive treatments, he agrees to take on a two year job piloting a ship of folks from his planet to another.  While en route, the ship encounters an asteroid (those asteroids, always causing havoc for traveling ships) and breaks apart as he attempts an emergency landing on a nearby planet.  It just so happens that planet is our earth, 65 million years ago, and that asteroid mess he ran through is the planet killer that’s about to slam into the Yucatan and end the stretch of dino-dominance.

Once on the planet, we get varying degrees of Pitch Black-style setup as Mills realizes all the passengers are dead and decides to not call for help, but then finds one passenger has survived.  It’s a young girl and since she is from a different area of his planet and his universal translator is broken, they do not understand each other.  She gives him a reason to keep going, call for help, and search for the part of the ship that had the rescue vessel in it. The good news is that its intact and they can get off this planet, the bad news is that it’s on the next mountain over, the space between is filled with dinos, geysers, quicksand, and other scary hazards.  Oh, and that asteroid is still on its way.

The movie is written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods.  I appreciated the run time, any longer than an hour and a half on this would have been way too much. The action is good, and I liked that the story and character development was done through flashbacks and video watching. We learn that Mills’s daughter died after he launched on this mission and that adds to why he was so quick to give up once they crashed. 

Both Adam Driver as Mills and Ariana Greenblatt as Koa are great, I really enjoyed the translator being broken so they had to work to understand each other.  Driver is expectedly competent at portraying a man who is capable of action, but definitely aching and blaming himself about the loss of his daughter. Greenblatt is even better since we don’t understand her either, but she clearly communicates what she is all about – feisty and invested.  I loved that she had to rescue Mills a couple of times from both quicksand and help with climbing a cliff. It made their relationship more of a partnership and more engaging to watch. 

I was a little disappointed by the dinosaurs themselves. Of the various species portrayed in the movie, I recognized one for sure (oviraptor), another one as a maybe (Dsungaripterus), and then the others were a little confusing, but I assume that was a T-Rex near the end. They were all the same shades of gray and mostly appeared in the dark.  Again, we are spoiled by Jurassic Park which worked with paleontologists to ensure their dinos are mostly correct.  Here, some of them just seemed like the team went ‘close enough’ and called it a day.  But I did love the oviraptor – always one of my favorites. 

Overall, the movie is quick and fun, with lots of action. I loved the fact that the impending asteroid impact put a ticking clock on their efforts to get to the ship, and I really loved how they worked together on their adventure. 

6 out of 10 – perfectly fine and certainly entertaining enough, and reminds you to watch Pitch Black  again.