65

dirs.: Scott Beck and Bryan Woods

2023

Are you fucking kidding me?

Terrible, just terrible. I’m glad I paid nothing to see this, other than in time and irritation.

It’s such a dumb fucking premise. How is Sam Raimi involved with this?

How dare people waste Adam Driver’s talents like this.

I guess part of the attraction for making this during the covid lockdown era is that it meant it would be easier to make because there are never more than two people on screen at any given time. Sure there are some establishing scenes at the beginning, showing that Mills (Driver) has a family and a daughter, and she’s sick, and he has to take difficult jobs that take him away from home for years at a time.

Those scenes are terrible and ill-conceived, like the entire movie. In lieu of any characteristics about the character that we couldn’t figure out for ourselves, the only trait they give him is pretty much the same trait they’ve given every character in the last 30 years, which is an either sick or dying kid as a motivator to look after some other kid.

Newflash, fuckos, any decent person would look after and try to save any kid, regardless of their tragic backstory. It’s so fucking lazy that…I will be one of hundreds of reviewers who make a crack like “this script could easily have been written by a dumb Chat GPT ripoff…”

And it could have. People keep claiming that AIs are going to ruin the world, or destroy the film industry (for writers, at least), but the fact is hack writers have been writing horrible generic scripts for decades.

Maybe Scott Beck and Bryan Woods are AIs. If so, maybe they’re North Korean ones.

With an awful premise that I could never take seriously, for any reason, the opening titles on screen tell us that 65 million years before humans existed, there were these people, and they’re pretty much humans. They look identical, and they speak English. And they talk about years and kilometres.

And they’re on some other planet, in some far away system, long ago, far far away, possibly.

And they have spaceships. Mills flies a space ship. It has people in it, in cryostatis or cryosleep or some version of cryo something. The ship is hit by asteroids, and crashlands.

Get this, it crashlands ON EARTH. 65 millions years ago, so it’s all dinosaurs and shit.

Mills is the only survivor, except until there’s another survivor, being a little girl. They don’t speak the same language, somehow. Apparently 65 million years before there were humans, there were humans elsewhere, and they spoke English and maybe, I dunno, Spanish or something. It’s equally plausible, in that it’s not plausible at all.

For the sake of the drama, it’s another obstacle for them to overcome in their struggle to survive together, and make it off this stupid, doomed planet.

Doomed? See, it’s bad enough that every dinosaur on the planet wants to eat them, never having had human before. But, and here’s the kicker (ugh): The asteroid that caused the extinction level impact on Earth 65 or so million years ago is heading for Earth, right now!

Talk about dumb luck, right? So they have to survive the dinosaurs, and make it to an escape pod, and then all will be okay. For them, not for all the species on Earth that are about to go extinct.

But first? They have to bond, like father and daughter. His daughter is dead, her parents are dead, so naturally…

I hate it, as a premise, hate it. People should help each other and try not to let each other be eaten by dinosaurs independently of whether that other person reminds them of someone, or whether they’ve come to terms with their feelings or their grief or that they are mildly hungry.

And as for the “fighting dinosaurs” bit – how much do you think that worked as the entirety of the pitch to convince Sony execs to greenlight this sorry excuse for a movie?

“Adam Driver fighting dinosaurs” is practically all anyone needed to say. But they failed even at that! How the fuck do you make fighting dinosaurs not interesting?

Don’t ask me, ask the shmucks that made this movie. Everyone loves dinosaurs, but I don’t think people will be developing fond memories of this flick long after it is utterly forgotten. How is it that the dinosaurs from a certain movie set, oh, I dunno, a Jurassic age ago, look better and more realistic / terrifying from like 25 years ago?

Who can say. People come up with dumb premises they are convinced will be killer all the time. The fact is, if the fights with the dinosaurs had been done right, all the other idiocies and missteps of the script would have been at least tolerable, if not completely ignored.

But none of the fights with dinosaurs are clever, funny, exciting or interesting, or well set up or choreographed. It’s just Adam Driver looking pensive at something he knows isn’t there, and occasionally shooting at the dinosaurs with a laser gun that still sounds like it’s shooting bullets.

Even a gun-toting hunter fantasy would have been better than this, something the NRA could have gotten behind and used to justify selling more guns to moronic ‘Muricans determined to make their species extinct with even more dedication or determination than that asteroid.

But this ain’t that flick. It’s so fucking dull. They never even end up implying that these aliens are the reasons why humanity evolved on Earth, as some accidental offshoot of some alien species, so the premise of humans existing 65 million years before humans existed doesn’t even get a stupid explanation.

It must just be some kind of coincidence.

I was almost positive they were going to do a Planet of the Apes type reveal at the end of the Earth 65 million years ago still actually being long after the civilisation we’re lucky enough to be a part of right now, but they’re not even that cheeky. It’s probably in the deleted scenes, somewhere, up the back maybe.

This is flat out fucking terrible. Yes, I watched this on a Thursday, but no, I was completely sober, and I can tell you that all the liquor in the world couldn’t improve this shit and make it passable. Adam Driver has been in some bad films, but rarely are they this pointless.

3 orders of magnitude that everyone’s time was wasted by making this and allowing people to watch it out of 10

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“We must climb all the way to the top of the mountain. That’s where the other half of the ship is.” – good to know - 65