65 Doesn’t Put in the Work to Be the Goofy, Gnarly B-Movie Its Dino-Premise Promises

In December of last year, social media was abuzz when the first trailer for 65 materialized. The concept of the numerically titled film seemed simple and familiar: A space explorer crash lands on a strange, possibly hostile planet far from home. The twist? It’s not an alien planet—it’s prehistoric Earth, full of creatures who’d just love to munch up a spaceman for an afternoon snack. Dinosaurs vs. laser guns feels American as apple pie.

But the fanfare was in reaction to both the inane twist and the actor in the pilot’s seat. That actor was none other than auteurist boy du jour Adam Driver, whose career has thus far been marked by collaborations with some of our greatest living directors and, of course, a Burberry ad. The choice for Driver—who seamlessly side-stepped blockbuster fame with Star Wars in favor of eclectic independent and dramatic work with esteemed greats like Ridley Scott, Noah Baumbach, Spike Lee, Leos Carax, and Jim Jarmusch—to make his first foray into sleazy genre fare, directed by the A Quiet Place scribes, was met with unabashed excitement. There’s not much argument against the simple truth that Driver is one of the era’s greatest and most surprising artists of his age, and his plucking from Lena Dunham’s Girls into cinematic prestige has been viewed as across-the-board earned. With highly anticipated comeback films from both Michael Mann and Francis Ford Coppola on the horizon for him, it was thrilling, then, to see the actor diversify his portfolio even further with some good old-fashioned sci-fi schlock.

But as it goes with too much modern genre fare—and perhaps should have been expected from creatives behind a movie like A Quiet Place, an insecure film that also seems embarrassed of the genre it’s in–65 holds back on the schlock as if it’s ashamed to let it go that far, as if audiences of the spaceman vs. dinosaurs movie aren’t there to simply have a rollicking good time. (Directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods feel compelled to “ground” their B-movie concept with “emotion,” as if that’s what has been missing from B-movies this entire time, and these two cracked the impossible code.)

Mills (Driver) leaves his home planet in search of a better one, a two-year mission that will force him to leave his wife Alya (Nika King) and daughter Nevine (Chloe Coleman), the latter of whom is suffering from an unidentified respiratory illness implied to be worsened by the planet’s atmosphere. But while shooting through space, Mills’ ship comes in dangerous contact with an asteroid belt, debris from which damages the ship beyond repair and sends him hurtling down to an unknown world. The rest of his crew have been killed in their cryo-stasis, and it seems all hope is lost—for one dark moment, Mills picks up his blaster with the intention of suicide. But he decides against it, discovering one other survivor from his ship: A young girl who had been on board with her family. Though the girl, Koa (Ariana Greenblatt) speaks a language unknown to Mills, the two band together to reach a viable escape vessel that landed on a mountain many kilometers from their ship.

Though the strange planet has a breathable atmosphere, Mills astutely discerns that there are alien lifeforms inhabiting it. These lifeforms, of course, are dinosaurs, as Mills’ existence on his home planet somewhere among the cosmos runs parallel to the timeline of prehistoric Earth. But eventually the true nature of the asteroid belt becomes clear, and the crash landing has also managed to sync up with the dinosaurs’ impending doom. Reaching the escape pod quickly becomes a race against extinction.