65

If you were to travel back in time you'd find a mix of the familiar and strange on our planet.

Of course, the question hanging over all of 65 is whether the inhabitants of the Cretaceous world would chase down a human morsel just for the novelty of it. Almost certainly mysteries and dangers existed in the Late Cretaceous of North America that we don’t know yet. rex in 65 indicates that the story unfolds in what’s now western North America, one of the areas of the Cretaceous world we’ve come to know quite well. “If a time traveler should be lost in the latest Cretaceous of North America,” says Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza, a paleontologist with the University of Vigo in Spain, they would see “lush tropical forests covering the lowlands to an abundance of streams running through them from nearby mountains.” The range wouldn’t look like it does today, but would be lower and still be in the process of being pushed up. Despite the impression that the Late Cretaceous was the peak of the “Age of Dinosaurs,” the great reptiles wouldn’t necessarily be around every other tree. For that reason, many production companies often shoot their prehistoric films in places like British Columbia, where mossy forests of redwoods at least approximate the Cretaceous look. Before considering a stroll through the Late Cretaceous forest, or to the theater, you should know a few things. Earth was still very much a greenhouse world, with high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere but relatively lower amounts of oxygen than today. The world was warmer than it is now, with an average summer temperature of about 82 degrees, but ice had once again begun to build at the poles. We still inhabit the same planet as our favorite saurians, after all, and the world of the dinosaurs was not quite like what we often see in the movies. [revised the end of the Cretaceous Period](https://stratigraphy.org/ICSchart/ChronostratChart2012.jpg) to be about 66 million years ago rather than the previous estimate of 65.5. From the trailers released so far, 65 follows the struggle of a pilot (Adam Driver) and a child (Ariana Greenblatt) as they stumble through Cretaceous forests and past ancient geysers as they’re chased by Tyrannosaurus, Velociraptor-like carnivores and other prehistoric terrors.

65, starring Adam Driver and Ariana Greenblatt, is out now in cinemas, but the sci-fi dinosaur movie just never lives up to its premise.

Instead of keeping them to separate movies, they merged them together and didn't succeed with either. Although the less said about where this story actually ends up, the better, even if the awkward nature of the final montage is a perfect capper to the confused tone of the entire movie. Beck and Woods certainly want to hit on deeper themes of grief and death, yet their own concept is inherently ridiculous so it's a tonal misfire. Here, there are dark, adult moments (such as Mills considering suicide) and they mesh awkwardly with the family-friendly sci-fi action. The movie was shrouded in secrecy until that [first trailer](https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/trailers/a42230581/65-movie-trailer-adam-driver/) made the title clear: it's 65 million years ago and a stranded pilot finds himself facing down dinosaurs. There's no real depth or subtlety here with an obvious metaphor of Mills trying to protect Koa like he couldn't his own daughter, so the emotional beats never land as you see them coming a mile off.

Adam Driver stars in '65' as a spaceship pilot stranded on Earth 65 million years ago. But is he supposed to be an alien? A time-traveler?

In a movie that didn’t start off by telling us it was taking place on Earth, this might be the final reveal, an aha moment that makes the context of the title clear — but it isn’t. And when I posed the same question to a studio representative as I had to friends, I was told something along the lines of “the answer is in your heart,” making me feel a warm sense of connection as I considered the possibility that the people involved in making, distributing, and marketing this motion picture shared my confusion. At no point during 65, which is the work of A Quiet Place writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, do Mills and Koa show the slightest recognition that the dinosaurs repeatedly trying to murder them are dinosaurs, which would be a point in the “aliens” column, or a sign that paleontology will fall drastically out of fashion in the millennia to come. What I’m getting at here is that I was running a little late to my screening of 65, and when I finally clambered into my seat in the dark, the movie had already started and I’d missed the first few minutes. One said yes, with the caveat that she’d seen it early enough that that might have changed — the movie has clearly been edited into oblivion, and there were rumors of multiple versions being A/B tested for audiences as late as last month. Film criticism is more an art than a science — a deeply human endeavor to which we bring our own personal histories, our insights, our limits, and our baggage in what is, more than anything, an act of sublimated autobiography.

Adam Driver fights to survive on prehistoric Earth in this entertaining popcorn movie. 65. Source: Sony Pictures. '65'. Dirs/scr: Scott Beck, Bryan Woods.

Left to create a world between a soundstage and a swamp, Kevin Ishioka, aided by Salvatore Torino’s lensing, provides a credible world for Mills and Koa. The thrill of 65 is simple ‘they’re behind you’ jumps. Thankfully Mills is brave, super-ripped-fit, a crack shot and able to take repeated punishment (a stabbing, a dislocated shoulder, being consumed by a swamp) and still soldier on. How has the production design managed to be so creative given most of the film’s budget seems to have been spent on Driver and dino-effects? Adam Driver gives the type of performance almost never associated with an action film in 65, a highly efficient thriller from the writers of A Quiet Place. 65 is a high-concept film – dinosaurs, space, Adam Driver, a kid – with a tiny cast, one of whom conducts most of her performance via hologram: it’s old style, in other words.

While dino-confrontations can get bloody and the plot can get silly, 65's father-daughter story makes this B-movie better.

Even at 9, you’d think Koa would be a little suspicious, given the state of the other half of the ship and, y’know, the dead bodies there and stuff. Despite the language barrier between Mills and Koa, Mills still manages to lie to Koa—communicating to her that her parents are alive and well with the other half of the ship. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. And except for a rather surprising amount of dino-blood and guts, 65 plays it surprisingly clean. (It continues to cause him periodic discomfort throughout.) He also dislocates a shoulder, and sprains an ankle, and falls from a big tree, and is bitten by a very nasty dino and nearly perishes in a crumbling cave (as does Koa). Add the dino fatality count after that big event, and we’re looking at a pretty huge number. (It’s pretty impressive, really, that she can even lift the thing.) Mills smashes a much smaller dino repeatedly with his weapon. One of the most disturbing critters to attack actually does its work from the inside. When Mills realizes the predicament that he’s in, he’s ready to just give up. But once she understands that pretty much everything on the planet would like to eat her, Koa becomes surprisingly resourceful. And while 10 miles might not sound like a long way, it is when the crash pretty much sounded the dinner gong for the surrounding fauna. (Though one wonders why Mills, coming from the planet Somaris and all, is so fluent in it.) Her parents are dead, though she doesn’t know it just yet.