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‘65’ Review: What on Earth?
Millions of years ago, a guy from another planet landed on this one. Like most survivors, he had a moody little girl with him.
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By A.O. Scott
To paraphrase an old Monty Python sketch , nobody suspects the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction.
Certainly the poor dinosaurs didn’t, though for their more obsessive present-day human fans the fact that this movie is called “65” — as in million years ago — might count as a spoiler. When Mills the space pilot crash-lands on a muddy, reptile-infested Earth after his vessel is hit by an asteroid, you might have an inkling of the larger disaster in store.
I don’t mean the movie; that would be unkind. “65,” directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (two writers of the first “Quiet Place” film), is not interesting enough to be truly terrible or terrible enough to be halfway interesting. As Mills, Adam Driver does a lot of breathing and grunting as he runs a gantlet of familiar dangers. In addition to the T. rexes and other saurian menaces, he faces quicksand, large bugs, falling rocks, malfunctioning equipment and the withering judgment of a 9-year-old girl.
But let’s back up a second. Who are these people, and how did they get to our planet before (if I may quote the opening titles) “the advent of mankind”? The answer is that they belonged to an ancient extraterrestrial civilization, one sufficiently advanced to have invented not only space travel, but the usual array of futuristic sci-fi technology.
Their health care system was pretty bad, though. Mills’s adolescent daughter, Nevine (Chloe Coleman), suffers from a persistent, apparently life-threatening cough, and the only way he can afford her treatment is by taking on a high-paying “long-range exploratory mission.” He’s already grief-stricken when the asteroid hits, cleaving his spaceship in two and killing all of his cryogenically frozen passengers except one, a girl named Koa (Ariana Greenblatt).
The folks on their home planet, realistically enough, speak more than one language, so Koa and Mills — whose native idiom is English — can’t communicate very well. Also, he’s a grumpy, unhappy man and she’s a moody girl, so we’re on familiar survival-story terrain. “65” is a little like “ The Last of Us ,” but with dinosaurs instead of mushrooms and no obvious sociological theme that would sustain a think piece.
Which would be to its credit, if it managed to be a simple, effective action movie. Or science-fiction movie. Or scary movie. Or something. Like Mills’s emotional back story, the special effects seem to have been pulled out of a box of secondhand ideas. Nor is the execution all that impressive. There’s little in the way of awe, suspense or surprise. Just a quickly hatched plan to get off this God-forsaken planet and leave it to its fate.
65 Rated PG-13. Dinosaur blood and prehistoric curses. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters.
A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott
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- Cast & crew
- User reviews
An astronaut crash lands on a mysterious planet only to discover he's not alone. An astronaut crash lands on a mysterious planet only to discover he's not alone. An astronaut crash lands on a mysterious planet only to discover he's not alone.
- Bryan Woods
- Adam Driver
- Ariana Greenblatt
- Chloe Coleman
- 951 User reviews
- 181 Critic reviews
- 40 Metascore
- 1 nomination
- Nevine's Mom
- (uncredited)
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
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Did you know
- Trivia The warning sound made by the ship's computer just after the crash was first used as the sound effect for the Martian walkers in The War of the Worlds (1953) .
- Goofs At exactly 21:48 Mills is walking through some pine trees and the tree on his left has a red spray paint marking on it. The trailer reveals that these marks were made by Mills. However the scene was scrapped. (He later uses this powder substance to draw a map in it.)
Mills : It's not because of you; it's for you!
- Crazy credits The TSG Entertainment logo dissolves into stars in space, leading directly into the opening shot of the movie, which is a long pan through celestial wonders of space, until the planet Somaris comes into view.
- Connections Featured in AniMat's Crazy Cartoon Cast: Part of Halle's World (2022)
User reviews 951
It was alright.
- Mar 5, 2023
- How long is 65? Powered by Alexa
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- March 10, 2023 (United States)
- United States
- Official Amazon Link
- 65: Al borde de la extinción
- Bray, Ireland
- Bron Creative
- Columbia Pictures
- See more company credits at IMDbPro
- $45,000,000 (estimated)
- $32,062,904
- $12,328,361
- Mar 12, 2023
- $60,730,568
- Runtime 1 hour 33 minutes
- Dolby Digital
- Dolby Atmos
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Identifying the distant remains of the rest of their ship using a handful of relics from his technologically advanced culture, Mills and Koa make a difficult trek across terrain filled with quicksand, steam-filled geysers, life-threatening flora and a variety of dinosaur species. But even as they overcome each new hazard, a much bigger one appears: the asteroid that felled their ship is on a collision course with Earth. They soon find themselves in a race against the clock to get to the ship’s escape pod before either dying in a planet-leveling fireball or being eaten by a carnivorous reptile.
But those quiet moments also give the audience to wonder: so a humanlike species from another planet, armed with the technology for interstellar travel (not to mention laser guns and 3D GPS) came to Earth 65 million years ago, long before humankind existed — and the point is “just” that they’re trying to get back home? Seems like a long way to travel to go nowhere particularly meaningful.
That said, Beck and Woods make dinosaurs frightening for the first time in decades, thanks to some classic misdirection and staging that involves a lot of shadows to make the audience say “nope” when the characters decide to plumb further into them. If their filmmaking isn’t particularly inventive, the duo approach it with the same kind of sturdy proficiency they use when borrowing scenes or genre boilerplate to tell their stories. “A Quiet Place” worked because it gently tweaked a lot of familiar formulas and then director John Krasinski executed the whole thing with a workmanlike attention to detail; “65” doesn’t have the same core emotionality holding it together (this family is fractured, not fighting to stay together), but behind the cameras Beck and Woods merely service their ideas rather than strengthening them from the page.
At just 93 minutes, ”65” feels pleasantly diverting in competition with a glut of sequels that include “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” “Creed III,” “Scream VI” and “John Wick Chapter 4” — not that anything in it is all that original. Then again, perhaps the reason it still falls short is because the idea of a standalone story seems too good to be true in an era of cinematic universes, especially given the fact that buried in its premise, before the title card even, is the idea there’s more than just our own to explore.
In which case, the best thing for “65” would be that no more installments follow, but if it proves a hit, audiences couldn’t possibly be that lucky. Who were Mills’ other passengers? Why was he transporting them? In what way do his “people” relate, genetically, or otherwise, to ordinary humans? These are all questions that you can see Sony salivating at the prospect of answering in a sequel or spinoff, but they all feel more intriguing without some sort of canonical answer. In which case, “65” is a film whose past feels like it was 65 million movies in the making, and its future depends on a several hundred millions in box office revenue. They best way to enjoy it is to let go of all that and be present.
Reviewed at Thalberg Screening Room, Los Angeles, March 9, 2023. MPA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 93 MIN.
- Production: A Sony release of Columbia Pictures presentation of a Bron Creative, Raimi Prods., Beck Woods production. Producers: Sam Raimi, Deborah Liebling, Zainab Azizi, Scott Beck, Bryan Woods. Executive producers: Maryann Brandon, Doug Merrifield, Jason Cloth, Aaron L. Gilbert.
- Crew: Directors, writers: Scott Beck & Bryan Woods. Camera: Salvatore Totino. Editors: Josh Schaeffer, Jane Tones. Music: Chris Bacon
- With: Adam Driver, Ariana Greenblatt, Chloe Coleman.
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