65 (2023) ★ ★
A movie about two human-like space explorers who crash land on prehistoric Earth should be an interesting way to spend ninety minutes. Instead it's a disappointing slog. I can't remember the last time a film pissed me off so much."65" has some moments of intrigue, and it's a visual bonanza of eye-catching scenes, but somehow nothing saves it from being boring. Or, rather, nothing saves it from itself.
Adam Driver plays Mills, and his character is needlessly complicated, right from the start. He leaves behind a wife Alya (Nika King) and sick daughter Nevine (Chloe Coleman). The mission that drives this story is to venture into the stars and find an off-world "cure" for Nevine, but judging by the strained expressions on their faces when they discuss it, her parents don't seem to think that this is likely to happen. Why did the writing and directing duo, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, feel it necessary to add this forlorn family drama backstory? It's beyond me.
The core idea of "65" is more than enough to fill the screen with dramatic suspense. Mills crash lands, and all but one of his crew survive. In a weirdly uninteresting sequence, Driver's character muddles around in a primordial swamp, searching for clues to his escape, and to determine if he's alone. We're subjected to thirty seconds of him pretending he's going to kill himself, with the requisite thought of Nevine pulling him back. He scans for life and finds a cryogenic pod holding an adolescent girl named Koa (Ariana Greenblatt), and here's where I think, okay, man and girl will develop a meaningful on-screen relationship centered on their race-against-the-clock goal of finding an escape ship and getting the hell out of dodge.
No such luck. Instead of excitement, I am subjected to illogical writing choices and awful pacing. Koa and Mills don't speak the same language. Why don't they? They have the technology to traverse galaxies, but they don't have anything on hand that can translate for them? And what the hell is an adolescent girl doing on this mission? None of it makes sense. Adding to the stupidity, Mills has to explain to Koa what's going on, now that they find themselves stranded on an alien planet. Apparently Koa has no pre-flight training on what to expect if the ship goes down. He has to literally draw it out for her in sand. All of this hand-holding seems bizarrely out of place, and proves to be a devastatingly dull time-suck.
I won't get into any spoilers or detailed plot points from here, but I want to finish my review by mentioning a crucial error in plot development. When their ship crashes, the viewer is led to believe that dinosaurs will be their main threat. Oh-so wrong-oh. The dinosaurs are robbed of their antagonistic value by the realization that an asteroid is hurtling toward Earth -- you know, the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. These two hapless individuals had hundreds of millions of years in which they could have been terrorized by prehistoric creatures alone, but they managed to pick the week when the Cretaceous Period officially ended. When the characters spot the gleam of an incoming Cretaceous-Paleogene Extinction Event in the sky, it diverts from any interest I might have had in T-Rex. Why worry about giant lizards when a planet-altering space rock is hurtling at you?
"65" has its moments, and some of the sequences, particularly in the final act, are intriguing to behold, and drew me up in my seat. Driver and Greenblatt do what they can with their silly lines and awkward dynamic. Their age difference (and Mills being married), eliminates any romantic possibilities, so father/daughter roles are filled, kind of. Except that Mills already has a daughter, and again, her relevance is impossible to glean from the circumstances that engulf him.
I did notice that Alya is Black and Nevine is of mixed race, so it looks like their inclusion in the story was merely so the producers could say, "We have Black people in our movie." This is fine, of course, except that once again, in a misguided effort to be "inclusive," Hollywood accidentally created two token Black characters who add a pittance to the narrative, while two white leads carry the story forward.
Is there anything more racist than that?
-- Bill Fontaine
