65

It starts off badly. Then it just gets worse. Adam Driver lives in space and if I didn't misunderstand the premise, he, his wife and their sick daughter are part of a distant civilisation of aliens that are extremely similar to humans but are not humans. The daughter suffers from a disease that requires very expensive treatment and in order to afford it, the father, Mills (Driver), has to work as a pilot on an expedition travelling through time and space. The fact that a technologically superior race out in space whose spaceship can travel through black holes and thus undertake time travel but at the same time does not have the technology or budget to cure a sick child feels bizarre and is a part of this story that perhaps should have been lingered on and explored further, because the start is more interesting than anything else offered.

Mills' spaceship goes through a black hole, gets caught in an asteroid shower, is damaged and crash lands on Earth 65 million years ago. Everyone dies, except Mills and a girl who speaks a language Mills doesn't understand. Their fight for survival begins as they crawl out of the crashed ship and realise that the planet they now stand on is populated exclusively by ancient lizards. Lots of hungry ancient lizards.

65 is written and directed by the duo who wrote {A Quiet Place}; Scott Beck and Bryan Woods went from unknown to world famous overnight, almost, when John Krasinski's acclaimed horror film put their screenwriting skills on the map. I love {A Quiet Place}, and I love {A Quiet Place: Part II}, and so I had pretty high expectations for 65. Had I been expecting a new {After Earth} or a new {Battlefield: Earth}, I'm sure I could have let this film just float by without much fuss as there has clearly been worse projects in the first three months of this year, but I can't. I thought this was going to be good. Like a dense, dark, violent mix between {Interstellar}, {Pitch Black} and {Jurassic Park}.

It is noticeable early on that Scott and Bryan have not directed a blockbuster before as they skip over key parts and fail miserably to build real people out of their characters. Driver's space pilot has both motive and mystery, but still never manages to become anything more than a lost man with a 90s haircut who crawls around and hopes to escape the huge jaws of the prehistoric lizards. The child actor Ariana Greenblatt (Koa), who among other things played a young Gamora in {Avengers: Infinity War}, gets too little time in the picture for the viewer to care about her well-being, and the problem that she and Mills speak different languages is not something that 65 chooses to stick with and work with, instead they mostly shout at each other for the duration of the film, which quickly gets really tiring.

Furthermore, the production design is lousy. The forests on Earth where the dinosaurs roam look like they were filmed at the local park and in the cave where they spend the night you can clearly see that it was formed from corrugated cardboard and hastily painted. It looks downright awful, quite simply. The dinosaurs themselves aren't much better, but have been designed by some sprightly little edge lord whose idea of "innovating" what dinosaurs once looked like falls flat. The T-Rex looks like a cross between a dog, Godzilla and one of the monsters in {A Quiet Place} and the fact that the little girl Koa kills a 30 ton T-rex with a twig without breaking a sweat really says it all about this fiasco.