Let’s get this out of the way: 65 is not a good movie by any conventional metric. It is not, however, a bad movie. It is a schlocky movie with a high enough budget that it doesn’t feel like a Roger Corman film. It is not a high minded enterprise, attempting to rewrite the cultural milieu; it is a genre action thriller that borrows liberally from it’s forbearers and knows not to overstay it’s welcome. It is the kind of film that was made in abundance in the 80s and 90s, and with the rare example largely disappeared from multiplexes these last 15 years or so. But because the pandemic broke the movie industry, like a patient with a brain injury and a dissociative fugue, they are going back and relearning one release at a time.
Another thing to get out of the way early on: yes, there are a lot of films that do what 65 does, but better. Want a sci-fi “crash victims need to survive on a hostile planet while trekking to reach an escape vessel”, watch Pitch Black. Want a two-handed “older man escorts semi-feral child to safety” watch Logan. Want an environmental “small group must be afraid of every step they take for fear of the monsters lurking around every corner”, watch A Quiet Place, which is the film this one is being advertised off the back of, whose writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods have stepped up to the director’s chair. But, and I cannot stress this enough, this movie has dinosaurs.
Beck and Woods are smart here: people love dinosaurs. People love seeing people be eaten by dinosaurs. But the number of good dinosaur movies is shatteringly small. And all credit where it is due, 65 is better than all three of the Jurassic World movies, but that’s like saying this overcooked meal made based off a TikTok recipe is better than this bucket of shit: of course it is. 65 is the best dinosaur movie since… let’s say Peter Jackson’s King Kong at least, but I’m very tempted to say since Jurassic Park thirty full years ago. It is certainly the most effective use of dinosaurs since JP. It makes dinosaurs scary again. It orchestrates terror, with dinosaurs as their instrument.
In the same breath, there is no reason why the baddies of 65 have to be dinosaurs. They could be any alien monster, and one assumes that the reason they aren’t is because aliens have been done to death and dinosaurs are sexy. Except, they had it both ways, because there are dinosaurs in this film that just aren’t dinosaurs. They straight up made up some critters here and put them alongside the obligatory T. rex and (thankfully size appropriate and feathered) raptors, and likely hid behind the old “the fossil record is incomplete” excuse. What was nice to see was that, along with rexy and raptors and nonsense creatures, the writers did look up other potential predators and threw them into the mix as well. I think the general population could use some exposure to kinds of dinosaurs that didn’t menace Jeff Goldblum three decades ago.
(Nerd aside: we see ten species of predator in this film, and only a single infant herbivore. I know it’s a scary monster movie, but that ecosystem is fucked. The film couldn’t find a single long shot of a herd of parasaurolophus wandering the edge of the valley? Also, there are more than enough movies out there that prove they can be hung on the premise of a couple people being hunted by a single predator; The Edge and The Grey come immediately to mind. Part of me feels like this film would jump from a generous 2-stars to a lower tier 3-star film if Adam Driver were slowly picking off members of a raptor pack, or being tormented by the same persistent oviraptor through the film.)
Adam Driver is an alien whose daughter is dying, so he takes a job piloting a long haul flight from one colony to another. The movie lays this out in the first ten minutes, and has more trust in the audience than most films would that the audience gets it, and is willing to move on. They don’t do a lot of world building, but they do enough to make their point, and then crash Driver’s ass onto LV-426. The film has all of four speaking roles, but it’s basically Driver’s film as the only other crash survivor - Ariana Greenblatt - doesn’t speak space English. So we get a “silent” performance from her, and all the weight of the film is carried by Driver. Because this is a film released in 2023, a not small amount of the 93 minute run time is spent with Driver in various states of emotional distress. He thinks about eating the end of his laser gun, but doesn’t. He thinks about his daughter and cries a lot. He doesn’t seem to remember that his unnamed wife (speaking role #4) exists, but he has a new charge to take care of in this reptile infested hellhole, and she gives him plenty to cry over too.
Driver’s ship gets hit by an asteroid while passing through the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy, and crash lands on an utterly insignificant little blue green planet which, as it turns out, is Mostly Harmful. The ship breaks up, but he is able to get a distress beacon sent, and can rendezvous with another ship via an escape shuttle which crashed 15km (because any sufficiently advanced civilization inevitably adopts a base-ten method of calculating distance) away, on the top of a mountain. So, Driver and Greenblatt trudge themselves across this valley, avoiding being eaten every couple hours, while also noticing that the asteroid in the sky is getting suspiciously larger. It takes them 3 days to walk 15km, except when it suddenly doesn’t. They have an endless supply of ammo, except when they don’t. They take on grievous bodily injuries, except when they don’t. I suspect that they might be Asgardians, because Driver gets the ever living shit kicked, bit, and dropped out of him, but he shrugs it off by the next scene break. If you want to see Adam Driver repeated abused, this is the movie for you.
There is a single shot in this film that is Very Good. A shot that makes me feel that Beck and Woods have potential as directors. That they can rise above the Uwe Boll of it all, and really stand out as genre directors. It involves a cave, a rain storm, a set of proximity sensors, and a shuffling sound in the darkness. It is suspenseful, it is enrapturing, it is effecting. It is the promise the rest of the film fails to live up to, but for one quick maybe minute-long scene they harnessed the true power of the jump scare and made it vibrate.
Will I ever feel a need to watch 65 again? Probably not. Am I happy that I set aside 93 minutes of an afternoon to watch it? Absolutely I am. It’s a dumb movie, but it’s a fun movie that you can let wash over you and then probably completely forget. And, I’d rather a theater full of 65s and Cocaine Bears than nothing at all.
65 is currently in theatres, though likely not for much longer.
Give This A Watch
Life
When I said this sort of schlocky genre film has been largely absent from the multiplex these last fifteen years, Life was a film I thought of that bucked that trend. Life has 90s space horror written all over it despite coming out in 2017. And, as the internet is quick to point out, a much better Venom movie than the Venom movie that came out a year later. This movie also owes a lot to the original Alien film, as do most space horror movies, but I am of the opinion that it is one of the few that actually deserve to be a successor to the holotype.
A crew of astronauts on their way home from Mars, discover microbial life in a sample, and despite all sense and reason, decide to experiment on it on the long ride home. It quickly becomes not microbial any more, and picks them off one-by-one, with Earth getting closer and closer. It’s simple, it’s successful at being scary when it needs to, suspenseful when it needs to, and has my preferred kind of ending. It is also very obviously elevated by the performances of Gyllenhaal and Ferguson, to of the most reliable and versatile actors working today. The film would have fallen flat with actor who didn’t commit 100% to their performances.
It suddenly occurs to me that I might have a soft spot for mid-March released Sony Pictures genre films that the studio wasn’t sure how to market. Huh. Good to know I have a type.