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Film review: 65 (contains spoilers)
Mar. 14th, 2023 07:12 amMan, this was so disappointing. You'd think 'Adam Driver fights dinosaurs' is a premise that would execute itself, but the directors have managed to expertly weave and dodge through their delightfully batshit story, genius casting and lavish special effects budget to produce the one possible version of this movie that is absolutely no fun at all.
In brief: space pilot Mills, of an alien race that looks, acts and organises its society exactly like modern humans, crash-lands his spaceship on our planet Earth 65 million years ago. All his passengers are killed except for nine-year-old Koa (played, very obtrusively, by an actress in her mid teens) who can't speak his language. The ship was torn in two by the crash, and the half containing their escape craft landed on a nearby mountain, separated from them by 12 kilometres of geyser fields, narrow caves and dinosaur-infested jungle. Cue perilous journey.
Or, in other words, cue ninety nonstop minutes of dinosaur jumpscares. That's it, that's the movie. Jumpscare. Looming peril. Jumpscare. Jumpscare. Looming peril. Jumpscare. Every time one life-threatening crisis passes, another leaps in without pausing for breath. The growing bond between Mills and Koa is gestured at but never meaningfully developed. The stakes are self-evidently nonexistent: with only two characters, they're obviously not going to kill one of them off halfway through the runtime. And the runtime is the weirdest part! At ninety minutes, it's not like they were under pressure to squash the movie down to a reasonable length. They could have made it just ten or twenty minutes longer and had ample time for the quieter, character-focused moments that were so desperately needed to break up the action. But instead they deliberately chose to reduce the whole concept to a Jurassic haunted house where you just wander from room to room getting jumped out at by dinosaurs. I spent the whole movie equal parts terrified and bored, which is a hard feeling to describe, but apparently what you get when you consume lots of amygdala-triggering stimuli all at once in a vacuum devoid of any greater meaning or interest.
To be fair, Adam Driver put in his usual award-worthy performance. To be fairer, there was in fact one (1) attempt at a non-dinosaur-jumpscare-related plot point, and it's not the directors' fault that it happened to be my Number One Bold Red Underline DNW:
But it is their fault they executed it so weakly that, despite the almost overwhelming DNW factor, I found it merely upsetting rather than unwatchable. If they hadn't directed other successful movies in the past, I'd be tempted to wonder if they decided to focus on dinosaur jumpscares because that's the only trick they actually know how to pull off.
So, yeah, big disappointment. I got none of the fun Lone Wolf and Cub adventures I wanted, a whole ton of pointless adrenaline I didn't, and I was too annoyed by the whole mess to even enjoy the heavy lashings of wounded yet stoic Adam Driver for what they were worth. Interestingly, I've since looked up reviews and the critics agree with me that it sucks, but for reasons so wrong I'm left boggling. They reckon it needed more gore - it was too family-friendly, apparently. Who the actual unholy fuck is taking their kids to see movies like 65? Kid me had enough trouble coping with the mere fact that bugs existed. If I'd had to watch a prehistoric scorpion crawl inside a girl's mouth while she slept and start choking her to death - to name just one wholesome, family-friendly example - I doubt I'd have ever recovered. There's probably something to be said here about desensitisation (if anyone's going to be affected by the current craze for gore and extremity, it'll be the film critics who spend all day every day exposing themselves to it for money) but mostly I'm just making a note not to take any future claims of family-friendliness with a big pinch of salt. What the fuck.
In brief: space pilot Mills, of an alien race that looks, acts and organises its society exactly like modern humans, crash-lands his spaceship on our planet Earth 65 million years ago. All his passengers are killed except for nine-year-old Koa (played, very obtrusively, by an actress in her mid teens) who can't speak his language. The ship was torn in two by the crash, and the half containing their escape craft landed on a nearby mountain, separated from them by 12 kilometres of geyser fields, narrow caves and dinosaur-infested jungle. Cue perilous journey.
Or, in other words, cue ninety nonstop minutes of dinosaur jumpscares. That's it, that's the movie. Jumpscare. Looming peril. Jumpscare. Jumpscare. Looming peril. Jumpscare. Every time one life-threatening crisis passes, another leaps in without pausing for breath. The growing bond between Mills and Koa is gestured at but never meaningfully developed. The stakes are self-evidently nonexistent: with only two characters, they're obviously not going to kill one of them off halfway through the runtime. And the runtime is the weirdest part! At ninety minutes, it's not like they were under pressure to squash the movie down to a reasonable length. They could have made it just ten or twenty minutes longer and had ample time for the quieter, character-focused moments that were so desperately needed to break up the action. But instead they deliberately chose to reduce the whole concept to a Jurassic haunted house where you just wander from room to room getting jumped out at by dinosaurs. I spent the whole movie equal parts terrified and bored, which is a hard feeling to describe, but apparently what you get when you consume lots of amygdala-triggering stimuli all at once in a vacuum devoid of any greater meaning or interest.
To be fair, Adam Driver put in his usual award-worthy performance. To be fairer, there was in fact one (1) attempt at a non-dinosaur-jumpscare-related plot point, and it's not the directors' fault that it happened to be my Number One Bold Red Underline DNW:
[Major spoiler]
Mills' young daughter, whose medical treatment he took this catastrophic job to pay for, died while he was on the job and unable to be there with her.But it is their fault they executed it so weakly that, despite the almost overwhelming DNW factor, I found it merely upsetting rather than unwatchable. If they hadn't directed other successful movies in the past, I'd be tempted to wonder if they decided to focus on dinosaur jumpscares because that's the only trick they actually know how to pull off.
So, yeah, big disappointment. I got none of the fun Lone Wolf and Cub adventures I wanted, a whole ton of pointless adrenaline I didn't, and I was too annoyed by the whole mess to even enjoy the heavy lashings of wounded yet stoic Adam Driver for what they were worth. Interestingly, I've since looked up reviews and the critics agree with me that it sucks, but for reasons so wrong I'm left boggling. They reckon it needed more gore - it was too family-friendly, apparently. Who the actual unholy fuck is taking their kids to see movies like 65? Kid me had enough trouble coping with the mere fact that bugs existed. If I'd had to watch a prehistoric scorpion crawl inside a girl's mouth while she slept and start choking her to death - to name just one wholesome, family-friendly example - I doubt I'd have ever recovered. There's probably something to be said here about desensitisation (if anyone's going to be affected by the current craze for gore and extremity, it'll be the film critics who spend all day every day exposing themselves to it for money) but mostly I'm just making a note not to take any future claims of family-friendliness with a big pinch of salt. What the fuck.
