65 Review: Adam Driver's Dinosaur Movie Is A Jurassic Dud
In 2018, Scott Peck and Brian Woods teamed up with John Krasinski to produce one of the best modern horror films , In A Quiet Place . It's first-rate, deceptively simple horror that can also be incredibly scary.
Beck and Woods clearly hope to strike the gold type again with 65 , a conceptual thriller that sees the duo live and write. The movie was shrouded in secrecy until the first trailer clarified the title. 65 million years have passed and a stuck pilot finds himself fighting dinosaurs.
It may not be time travel, as many think, as lead actor Adam Driver explains, but it's an interesting concept nonetheless. Science fiction with dinosaurs. We've already bought tickets.
However, 65 people did not adhere to this concept and ended up in the Jurassic period.
© Sony Pictures Adam Driver, 65 years oldIf there is an advantage of 65 , it is the short development time, which means less time spent creating a solid concept. During a long convoy mission, Mills (the driver) fails to prevent his ship from crashing into an undetected asteroid belt, causing it to crash-land on Earth (not that it is).
Everyone on board is killed in the crash, or so Mills believes, until he is informed of the surviving passenger, Koa (Ariana Greenblatt). Together they must cross this unknown and dangerous terrain to reach the only rescue vehicle.
That's it, conspiracy sage. Like A Quiet Place , Beck and Woods is all about personality and excitement, but unlike A Quiet Place , 65 never fails to make your heart flutter or even genuinely interested in its characters.
Mills and Coa hail from; He has to go back to his family, he is looking for his parents, but they are treated in general conditions. There's no real depth or subtlety here to the obvious metaphor of Mills trying to protect Koa the way he failed to protect his own daughter, so the emotional punches never quite come when you can see them coming from a mile away.
© Sony Pictures Adam Driver, Ariana Greenblatt, 65Adam Driver is busier than ever, but he's in the wrong movie. Beck and Woods certainly wanted to touch on deeper themes of pain and death, but their concept is inherently absurd, so it's a tonally wrong. The climax, which we won't spoil here, involves a hologram that looks amusing rather than heartbreaking.
We're not saying 65 should stoop to bullshit, but it doesn't help that Cocaine Bear recently showed how to take the OTT concept and give it some heart. There are some dark moments for adults (Mills contemplates suicide, for example) and it blends awkwardly with the sci-fi family.
All this is not an easy task. When Beck and Woods dive into dinosaur action, they know how to build tension in a simple setting. The movie takes place in a cave where Mills encounters dinosaur enemies in total darkness, giving you an idea of what the movie 65 was like.
© Sony Pictures Adam Driver, Ariana Greenblatt, 65You have to forgive the graphic nature of dinosaurs, but the idea of making dinosaurs a space menace is one of the few that actually works. While there's no talk of how this story actually ends, the better, even if the final final cut fits perfectly with the muddled tone of the entire movie.
There was a general impression that Beck and Woods had two movies to make: an exploration of pain and survival and a blockbuster family movie featuring a giant dinosaur. Instead of keeping them in separate movies, they put them together and they couldn't either.
You may think you can't go wrong with dinosaurs and science fiction, but 65 proves that you really can.
65 is already in cinemas.
