There’s something to be said for a good B-movie. You know the type. It’s a movie where the premise is basically the sort where even if it is a smart movie, you’re probably better off turning your brain off while you watch it. It’s there to be pulpy and fun and not something deep. The new movie 65 has a very B-movie premise: a human spacecraft crash lands on Earth 65 million years in the past when dinosaurs were a thing. It could be something like Jurassic Park crossed with a touch of Star Trek or something along those lines. Written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, the writers of the first A Quiet Place movie, at the least, it should come across as clever and exciting.

For whatever reason, the Rotten Tomatoes score is not very high. Well, I never let that stop me from seeing something before.

Spacecraft pilot Mills (Adam Driver) from an advanced civilization both far from Earth and from a long time ago (I have no idea if he comes from a galaxy far, far away) has taken a job to fly a ship transporting cryofrozen colonists from one world to another, an exploratory mission that will take him a total of two years. He doesn’t really want to go, but his young daughter is sick and needs the expensive medical care this job can pay for. However, the ship is damaged by an unexpected asteroid collision and crashes on an unknown planet. Most of the colonists were lost in the crash and Mills himself was injured. In something of a funk, he may not have the interest in surviving on this unknown world crawling with dangerous reptiles The escape craft is 15 kilometers away and halfway up a tall mountain. Geysers, large insects, tar pits, and the occasional Tyrannosaurus footprint makes him reluctant to even try, but then he discovers something: he’s not the only survivor.

A girl of about nine named Coe (Ariana Greenblatt) also survived, and that gives Mills an incentive to survive. Coe, however, does not speak the same language as Mills, and their rudimentary attempts at communication in light of the fact that the ship’s translator was damaged beyond repair will have to do as the pair cross unknown territory and battle the alien monsters that they find there. Mills has some weapons and basic gadgets that give him some advantages, but this is still a trip that the pair might not survive for a wide variety of reasons. Can they make this dangerous trek and survive long enough to get back into space and hopefully to a rescue craft?

So, I can’t say I have read too many of the reviews, but I don’t quite know why this one is getting a bad RT score. It’s far from perfect, but it does have a lot going for it. Driver is a solid actor, the script is fairly smart in its pacing and ups and downs, and while the story does offer a few cliches, it doesn’t offer as many as I might have expected. There are some good thrills on display here, and like A Quiet Place, I get the impression that the story was at least well thought-out, setting up all the audience needs to know. It is, in many ways, a perfectly fine B-movie sort of movie.

The problem is I get the impression that the people making it took what they were doing far more seriously than the story requires. There are some truly ambitious shots here and there, and Driver, though a fine actor in his own right, may be a little too serious for a roll like this. There’s a part of me that thinks this movie would have worked just a little bit better if it played out the way the basic plot description suggests it should. This is a pulpy spaceman vs dinosaurs story. It should carry a tone that fits that basic idea, and 65 seems to be shooting for depths it just doesn’t quite have. It can still be a fun movie and all, but it isn’t necessarily as deep as it seems to think it is.

Grade: C+


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