A space pilot crashlands on Earth 65 million years ago, and has to fight prehistoric predators while getting himself and his young charge Koa to their escape vessel. (My re-cap article is here)
65 million years ago, Man meets Dinosaur. That’s 64 million years before Raquel Welch met Dinosaur. (I hope you’re all feeling bad for laughing at that movie now. It was actually very prescient.)
Unfortunately considering 65 has dinosaurs, an asteroid strike and Adam Driver, until the final third the film manages to be resolutely unexciting. Indeed, as Mills (Driver) and young Koa (Ariana Greenblatt) traipse through pretty forests transformed into orange and blue at night, while having to dodge stinking, bubbling geysers and T-Rexes, 65-million-years-ago-Earth fits that apocryphal Mark Twain description of golf as “a good walk, spoiled”.
That asteroid hurtling towards Earth is not just any asteroid but *the* asteroid, on its way to wipe out king lizard and most else besides. It’s the rock’s accompanying meteor storm which causes Mills’ spacecraft to crash, and now he and Koa need to reach the top of the mountain where the escape pod has ended up. Mills has told Koa her parents are waiting for her there, when actually all the other passengers, held in cryostasis, were killed in the crash.
The meteor storm is brutal as life support coffins break free and tumble out while what’s left of the ship careers across the sky, its tail of flame a precursor to the massive asteroid that will also hit in a couple of days.
Like 2021’s underwhelming Chaos Walking, 65 reminded me of one of those old BBC scifi drama serials that were filmed in the wood nearest to the TV studio. Partly this is because 65 is a COVID-era movie (hence the tiny cast, computer-generated villains and outdoor setting), though it could well be set on our doorsteps, when you consider how many bits of dinosaur have been dug out of Dorset’s quarries and cliffs. And it has another ’80s throwback — throwforward? — in quicksand, one of that decade’s existential threats.
The baby dino in the quicksand is the most brutal scene, though it’s also wretchedly funny and makes a good point about human intervention, which often either makes things worse or has no overall benefit. Koa insists Mills pull the distressed creature from the grasping murk, only for it to trot off to instant death at the hands/claws of another group of dinosaurs. Koa is distraught, Mills angry at himself for being distracted by sentimentality. Still, the killer dinosaurs are destined to die in 24 hours in an asteroid inferno, which is karma of a sort I suppose.
The dinosaurs are loud, and vicious, apart from the cute baby (which would probably have grown up to be vicious anyway). Mills calls them aliens despite him being the alien species here. To labour the point, when he suits up to venture outside his black spacesuit and black helmet with a backwards point resemble a baby xenomorph. There are other calls to that universe. One of Prometheus‘s world-building giant Engineers was sent to Earth to seed life by killing himself; Mills and Koa are utterly insignificant yet witness its near-destruction. Both are depicted on cave walls; one wonders what a future anthropologist would make of Koa’s drawing of a human family, if it were discovered.
Mills and Koa don’t share the same language, but get by on sand diagrams, sign language and Mills repeating things loudly and expecting her to understand. He also has various gizmos which need no words: one shows the heavens, and the incoming asteroid. There’s familiarity for us in Mills’ mix of high and low tech. He has a spaceship, and tiny ballbearing bombs for getting out of sticky situations; yet trying to identify Koa he flips through a hard-copy booklet of all the passengers on board.
Mills’ home planet Somaris also seems very familiar, with its beaches, jobs, salaries and exorbitantly-priced healthcare. Maybe every civilisation follows the same template, destined to repeat the mistakes of its predecessors even if we never meet. What happened to them? Perhaps they continued for a few centuries, the long dead Mills mythologised as their own dragon-slaying St George. Maybe they died out or blew themselves up. Maybe they outgrew their bodies and uploaded themselves to a version of the Internet, and are now on a fossilised USB drive sitting in a drawer in a galaxy far far away.
65 improves massively once we’re past the halfway mark. Paradoxically, although this is when the stakes get higher (the asteroid is visible in the sky), it works by focussing on smaller details. A fight between Mills and a beaked dinosaur in a pitch black cave is shown mostly via little 3D holograms of both life forms on Mills’s gizmo; a clawed hand creeps around a tree trunk to grasp a giant bug for dinner. As Mills sinks into a quicksand pond, his final view as his head goes under is the asteroid heading towards them, what he assumes is his final thought presumably that he has failed Koa.
I’ve seen this twice now — I found my half-written review in Drafts and, half-finished reviews niggling at my mind like a bibliophile’s half-read books, felt obliged to start 2024 by rewatching the movie and finishing the review. And the film seemed much improved on my second watch: more truthful and less trite.
It’s improved by the performances of Greenblatt and Driver who bring humanity to what could have been ridiculous, and also the constant pummelling that pre-historic Earth doles out to poor old Mills. Both are terrified, yet Mills tries to save her and Koa in turn tries to saves him. He’s standoffish at first, believing he’s failed his ill daughter left behind on Somaris, the deliberate distance he puts between him and Koa amplified by language issues. Greenblatt is excellent, making Koa believably childish and also believably resilient and ingenious as she grows into her surroundings and the predicament they find themselves in.
Maybe this year I’m just nicer, though one really shouldn’t have to watch a film twice to get it. But much as I love dinos, maybe they have, finally, had their time. They’ve had two great runs: 245 million BCE to 66 million BCE, and then again from 1993’s Jurassic Park to now. Perhaps it’s time to retire them and bring back something else (giant tortoises, maybe?)
Missed anything? read my re-cap here — 65: it was the worst of times, it was the end of times.
Watch the trailer for 65 now:
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