Movies & TV / Columns

The Good and Bad of 65

April 14, 2023 | Posted by Bryan Kristopowitz
Adam Driver Ariana Greenblatt 65 Image Credit: Sony Pictures

The Good and Bad of 65

Image Credit: Sony Pictures

Warning: this review contains spoilers.

65 is a big hooha science fiction adventure movie starring Adam Driver and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, the tandem responsible for the horror flick Haunt (they both write and directed that movie) and the sci-fi horror flick A Quiet Place (they wrote the screenplay for that). It’s also the first movie I saw in a movie theater in nearly three years (the last movie I saw in a movie theater before the Covid-19 pandemic was Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, which I reviewed here. I saw Skywalker in January of 2020, just in case you were wondering on the exact date). 65 tells the story of Mills (Adam Driver), a professional space transporter guy who decides to take on a 2 year transport job in order to pay for his sick daughter’s medical treatments. In the midst of that job, the spaceship he’s in charge of is damaged and crashes on a “mysterious planet.” The only survivors of the crash landing are Mills and a young girl named Koa (Ariana Greenblatt). Mills and Koa don’t speak the same language, and Koa’s parents were killed in the crash. After doing some soul searching, Mills decides to protect Koa on this new planet and find a way to get to an escape pod/emergency transport that crashed several miles away and may still be intact. There’s danger around every corner as Mills navigates the various creatures and terrain, which includes what appear to be dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs? Did dinosaurs also exist on other planets in the solar system or is this mysterious planet somehow Earth? And if this planet is Earth, just when, exactly, does this movie take place? Just what the heck is going on here?

And so, without any further what have you, what’s good and what’s bad about 65?

The Good

Image Credit: Sony Pictures

Adam Driver’s performance: Driver does a fantastic job as Mills, a badass adventurer type who also happens to be a devout family man. At first, it looks like he’s going to essentially commit suicide and end it all because there’s no hope of getting off the mysterious planet. But then he realizes that he can’t do that, that he has to protect Koa because she has no one. Protecting Koa also helps fill the void in his soul after it’s revealed that his daughter Nevine (Chloe Coleman) died during this job (that fact makes his earlier suicide attempt even more sad and poignant. He probably would have gone through with it if he didn’t have Koa to protect).

Driver does a fantastic job with the action hero moments he has to engage in, fighting dinosaurs with his pulse rifle weapon and just keeping Koa alive. Driver should really do more action movie roles. I know he’s an in demand dramatic actor and he probably wants to win awards and whatnot, but he should really look into doing more action genre work. And I don’t mean more science fiction (although that would be cool), I mean straight up action stuff. Why hasn’t he done something like John Wick or Taken?

Driver also does a great job making you believe he knows what the heck is going on with the plot (I’ll get into that later). That’s always the kind of performance that should be celebrated.

Dinosaurs look cool: The Jurassic Park franchise has set the standard for modern cinematic dinosaurs and 65 does a terrific job with its dinosaur special effects. They look just as good as the Jurassic Park dinosaurs and yet they still have their own personality and look just different enough to where you won’t mistake them for the ones from Jurassic Park. And they’re all incredibly dangerous looking, which is exactly what you want in a dinosaur movie. Well, there’s one that doesn’t look dangerous, that poor one that Koa tries to help only for it to get attacked and killed by a pack of killers. That was a damn sad moment.

Overall production design is fantastic: From the spaceship interiors to the jungle/forests there isn’t a moment in 65 that feels like the actors are acting on a movie set. They’re obviously on a movie set when it comes to the spaceship, but the jungle and forest areas look like the movie’s scenes were shot in a jungle and or forest somewhere (Wikipedia says that the movie was filmed in a national forest in Louisiana and in Oregon). It’s always a great thing when a science fiction movie uses real locations that make you think they’re actually from another planet.

There’s a real sense of danger throughout the movie: When your movie basically only has two characters in it, there’s a good chance that both of them will likely survive whatever crisis they’re going through because it would be a real downer if they both died (one can die, maybe, but there needs to be a really good reason for that to happen). And while that “truth” is proven to be, well, true in 65, there are multiple moments where it seems like either Mills or Koa could be killed and eaten by one of the dinosaurs that are everywhere. Mills and Koa can’t communicate with one another, Mills might not have enough weaponry to fight off the attacking dinosaurs, and what happens to Koa if Mills is so badly injured that he can’t keep protecting her? There’s also a moment where Mills gives Koa a bunch of small explosives that you think will have to be used sparingly so she doesn’t run out of them, and then she uses all of them at once. Holy hooey what is she going to do now? She can’t use the pulse rifle that Mills has, and throwing rocks and whatnot at the dinosaurs won’t do much of anything, so what the hell is she going to do if Mills is fully incapacitated?

And what if they get to the escape pod, they find out that it doesn’t work and they can’t fly off the planet? And then there’s the whole “there’s a gigantic asteroid that’s going to crash into the planet’s surface at any moment” thing, which becomes the ultimate ticking clock toward the end of the movie. If the dinosaurs don’t get them, will the asteroid destroy them?

Again, you know that Mills and Koa will likely survive, but the movie makes you think that Mills and Koa aren’t going to make it. They’re just up against way too much to survive.

Image Credit: Sony Pictures

Movie is only 93 minutes long: When I first heard about this movie I assumed that, like most big hooha special effects movies nowadays, 65 was going to be well over two hours long. Amazingly, 65 goes against that “trend” and clocks in at a lean and mean 93 minutes. And that runtime is glorious. 65 doesn’t waste a second, it moves swiftly, and it leaves you wanting more when it’s over. I clearly picked the right movie for my “first movie back in movie theaters since the start of Covid-19.”

The Bad

Movie doesn’t establish itself well enough at the beginning: According to the movie’s plot description on Wikipedia, the Mills and Koa characters are sort of humanoid aliens who crash land on Earth 65 million years ago (hence the title 65). I didn’t grasp any of that as the movie’s possible plot until the movie was over. I mean, it’s a movie that starts out in space, people are on a spaceship travelling from planet to planet and whatnot, why can’t Mills and Koa travel through a wormhole or something and end up back on Earth 65 million years ago? Or why couldn’t Earth just be an earth like planet? It’s all so weird and unnecessarily mysterious.

Now, if we knew what was happening from the beginning maybe the movie’s plot specifics wouldn’t be confusing.

The title is too ambiguous for its own good: What does “65” mean, exactly? It’s meant to note that the plot of the movie takes place 65 million years ago, but, again, you don’t really grasp all of that until the movie is over. Why couldn’t “65” just be the number of the planet in some sort of “space database?” Maybe then the title of the movie could have been Planet 65. That still would have been mysterious but at least it would have sort of explained what the movie was kind of about. It takes place on Planet 65. People would have understood it.

Conclusion

I enjoyed 65 quite a bit. It features a simple yet exciting adventure story, a terrific lead performance, the special effects are fantastic, and above all else, it’s a fun time at the movies. The movie hasn’t set the box office on fire either domestically or internationally, which is a shame as I think people would like it if they gave it a chance. I have a feeling that 65 will eventually find its audience on home video, on TV, and via streaming. It likely won’t be as spectacular at home as it is in a real deal movie theater, but I bet it will still rock.

Go see 65 in a movie theater if it’s still playing in a theater near you. And be sure to pick it up when it hits home video.

Rating: 8.5/10.0

**

The Gratuitous B-Movie Column The Facebook Page!

Please check out and “like” The Gratuitous B-Movie Column Facebook page, which is here.

Image Credit: Sony Pictures

The Gratuitous B-Movie Column Facebook page! Yeah!

**

Follow me on Twitter!

**

Well, I think that’ll be about it for now. Don’t forget to sign up with disqus if you want to comment on this article and any other 411 article. You know you want to, so just go do it.

B-movies rule. Always remember that.

article topics :

65, Bryan Kristopowitz