You really shouldn't be able to go wrong with the premise of this movie. A man piloting a space ship with a cargo of people in suspended animation, flies into a meteor storm and crash lands on a planet. Surprise! The planet is Earth and it is the age of the dinosaurs! OH NO! Now he has to survive with nothing but a wrecked spaceship and a big gun.
"But..." you might say and sure there is a lot we could nitpick about the setup but that would be a category error. If you are choosing to watch this film, you are choosing to watch Adam Driver shoot dinosaurs with a hi-tech gun. "But why is he flying into this solar system if he is flying these people to a completely different planet somewhere else?" is not a legitimate question. The film comes pre-exempt from such criticism just as you can't ask a rom-com to not depend so much on random coincidences or misunderstandings, or why cars are so prone to exploding in an action movie, or what the actual murder rate was among wealthy British people in a period murder mystery.
No. What you can and must demand from a film whose sole purpose is Adam Driver shooting dinosaurs with his space gun is that it be FUN. Sadly, this film is extraordinarily dull and serious while simultaneously being very silly. Driver is a great actor and does what he can with a script that has him as a pilot who has taken this job (which makes no sense) to pay for the healthcare of his terminally ill daughter (because he is actually from a pre-human alien civilisation from a different part of the galaxy that coincidentally has "healthcare" as a major plot driver just like 21st century America). He's a sad guy but luckily he finds purpose when the only other survivor of the spaceship crash is a teenage girl who doesn't speak English. Together they must walk 12 kilometres to find the other half of the ship which contains the escape pod.
12 kilometres isn't very far but it is rough terrain and there are dinosaurs. Luckily Driver has a big gun but appears to have forgotten how to make fire. The dinosaurs aren't that scared of his gun except then they are.
Many people have rightly objected to many modern genre films indulging in quips, banter and pop-culture references. They may be pleased to know that 65 avoids such things, they may be less pleased to know that it would have been a much better film if it had taken the more corny path. Being more "Whedonesque" wouldn't have made it a good film by any stretch but it would have been less dull.
Likewise, the dinosaurs become reduced to little more than alien fauna and a generic threat. The appeal of dinosaur films is the idea that it would be cool to see dinosaurs doing dinosaur things. 65 reduces them to generic monsters which is just silly. Cut out the "this is all in the past" premise and have Driver attempting to survive on an alien planet then, while we wouldn't get dinosaurs, we'd get potentially more weird and wacky monsters. Instead, the premise restrains the absurdity of the monsters without attempting to be a genuine attempt at paleontological accuracy or an excuse to indulge in dino-extravaganza.
This film simply is not stupid enough to be any good and also too stupid to be interesting.
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