JP Movie Review: “65” starring Adam Driver
Title: “65”
Logline: A spacecraft transporting passengers to an unknown destination crashes on a planet inhabited by dinosaurs.
“65” Release Date: March 17, 2023
Premise/setup: Sixty-five million years ago, human beings exist and are living on one or more planets somewhere in space.
Adam Driver is a spacecraft pilot for hire who has an opportunity to pilot a ship to another planet with “cargo” consisting of human beings who are in suspended animation until they reach their destination. By agreeing to take this job, Driver’s character will be away from his wife and young daughter for a lengthy period of time, but the pay is excellent, and Driver will stay in touch with his family with messages and video chats.
CUT: Driver has taken the job and appears to be the sole occupant on this ship who is “awake.” He communicates with his family during the trip via video calls and taped messages sent from home, and we see his daughter misses him. The focus here is on the relationship and bond between the daughter and the father. Nothing is done with his wife.
Before Driver can reach his destination, the spacecraft winds up in an asteroid belt and is struck and damaged by an asteroid. Driver radios for help and the spacecraft crashes on what is to him – an unknown planet - that we know to be Earth.
The spacecraft is badly damaged, and Driver has suffered a serious injury that is not life threatening. He leaves the ship to assess the damage and check for survivors. As he walks around the marsh in which the spacecraft crashed he see the bodies of the passengers scattered about. It appears that there are no survivors. NOTE: the ship is equipped with weapons and Driver brings a space rifle with him.
In an odd scene, Driver radios his employer that there are no survivors except for him, and not to send help.
During Driver’s exploration, the audience sees evidence of animal life that Driver may or may not see. Driver spots an enormous three-toed footprint.
During his explorations, Driver sees a person and gives chase. Driver catches up, and we see it is a little girl. Driver brings her back to the remains of the spacecraft and identifies her using the spacecraft’s tech. She does not speak English.
Driver radios his employer that there is a survivor and to send help.
The ship was equipped with an escape craft that will enable Driver to leave Earth. Driver is now motivated to locate it and uses a multi-tasking tracking device with a display that is important in a variety of scenes. The escape craft was separated from the main ship as it crashed and wound up on a mountain a distance away.
Driver tries to communicate with the little girl that they are going to try to reach the spacecraft and finds it difficult because of the language barrier. She is teary and Driver lies when he tells her that they are going to a place where she will be reunited with her parents. Note: he is short/impatient with this child who is small and under 12.
Driver notices a disturbance in the sky and using the tracking device learns that (1) the planet is going to be bombarded by the asteroids he encountered during his trip that caused him to crash, and (2) that bombardment is going to happen very soon. Driver now has a deadline and a race against time is introduced as a plot element.
The balance of the movie revolves around the two survivors trying to cross a forest inhabited by deadly prehistoric animals of different sizes who attack them.
The pleasure in the movie is seeing new dinosaurs we haven’t seen before on screen, and the travelers fight them off. You either enjoy these sequences and find them entertaining or the movie is a crashing bore.
The relationship between Driver and the girl is problematic. We discover that his daughter died of cancer in videos that she sent to him before her death in which she tearfully laces into him for having left her. He is devastated by what happened – both his daughter’s tragic death and her anger toward him - which explains why he initially told his employer not to send help. Again, we never see his wife in any videos sent from home. We never see her response to her daughter’s death or a shared experience of grief and mourning between husband and wife. These scenes could have been edited out.
His behavior toward the girl is odd. He seems impatient and hostile toward her. This is problematic to me because he was a parent who lost a child and now, he is the custodian/guardian of a little girl who lost her parents. He is oddly unsympathetic and mean. I am obviously not the only viewer who found this choice bizarre. Instead of bonding with her and doing everything he could out of a sense of guilt/sympathy to make things right and take care of her in a way that he could not do for his own daughter, he is doing everything he can out of a sense of impersonal duty with the knowledge that if he saves her, she is an orphan and will ultimately have to learn the truth. So he is a cold fish.
This dynamic evokes the emotional weight of A QUIET PLACE. It also appears to be a deliberate contrivance to differentiate the relationship between Driver and the girl, from curmudgeonly Sam Neill and the boy and girl he protects and grows fond of in JURASSIC PARK. In my view this is a serious storytelling error. This movie would have been much better by tweaking that dynamic. The idea that we needed a third-act character transformation for the movie to work is simply lamebrained. In fact, the dynamic is off-putting and we don’t view Driver as being very heroic.
As their travels progress, their relationship and bond grows stronger, and she eventually and unconvincingly saves his life. (Here is where suspension of disbelief is key. This whole set piece would have worked better if she was 16 or older. Character age is key in these stories.)
The travelers reach the escape vehicle which is damaged, and they are attacked by 2 grown T-Rexes. Driver uses his space rifle to deadly effect and kills them fairly easily. This scene is reminiscent of the scene in the sequel to JURASSIC PARK where a pair of Rexes knock a bus off a cliff but nowhere near as good. My instinct is that they decided not to devote a lot of time to this sequence because it has been done before.
So, this is the plot: travelers crash/discover an undiscovered/uncharted prehistoric world. They are marooned. They must cross a land filled with prehistoric animals to escape. As they cross the terrain they are attacked. They must race against time because of the impending threat of the asteroids smashing into the planet. The travelers survive and escape in the nick of time as the cosmic debris smashes into the earth and devastates it in what we know is an extinction event. The end. We assume help is coming that will rescue them. The running time is a little over 90 mins.
Analysis and Observations: there is no sense of fun in “65”. Zero. No humor at all. It could be described as a drama. Driver never expresses awe or fear. We have no sense of the kind of world he came from and what its animals were like because we spent no time there.
Merging sci fi elements with dinos works fine. But modern weapons are just too much. It was very easy for Driver to kill the dinos if he had a good shot at them regardless of their size. There was no tension when he killed the Rexes at the end. He was merciless because he had to be in order to launch the ship. He mows them down.
Driver has no one to talk to. His communications with the girl are hampered by the language barrier. I don’t see this as a good choice.
The addition of the element of loss in Driver’s character’s backstory does not help this movie as written. It could have; but it didn’t. In fact, I’ll tell you one easy tweak: insert a scene in the beginning where Driver’s wife and Driver have a serious conversation about taking the job and she tells him not to. He scoffs and says they need the money but she tells him they don’t. This long trip is going to be harmful to their daughter. That simple tweak would have helped. Then have her leave him after the death. Then change Driver’s response to finding a child as a survivor. This would have totally changed the emotional arc of this film in a positive way. His determination to reach the ship would have been galvanized by his commitment to rescue the girl as a surrogate for the daughter he felt he failed. Now, we’re cheering for him!!
I could go on and on. The writers did not solve the puzzle of how to make an exciting dino movie that breaks from the longstanding paradigm of find a lost world with dinosaurs; get chased; go home. They merely updated it.