- UK release: March 2023
- Directors: Scott Beck · Bryan Woods · Writers: Scott Beck · Bryan Woods
- Studio / distributor: Columbia Pictures; Raimi Productions
- Genre: Science fiction survival thriller / creature feature · Runtime: 93 minutes (BBFC 15)
- Main cast: Adam Driver (Marriage Story, Star Wars: The Force Awakens) as Mills; Ariana Greenblatt (Avengers: Infinity War) as Koa; Chloe Coleman (My Spy) as Nevine; Nika King as Alya
- IMDb: 5.4 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 35% critics / 64% audience · My rating: 7 / 10
There is a particular kind of high concept that sells itself in a single sentence, and “Adam Driver fights dinosaurs with a laser rifle” is one of the purest examples to come along in years. It is a B-movie pitch in the best sense, the sort of thing that would have been a paperback with a lurid cover, and the surprise is who is delivering it: Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, the writing team behind A Quiet Place, here directing for themselves. The question hanging over 65 is whether the men who built one of the most disciplined creature thrillers of recent years can do it again at feature length on their own terms, or whether the one-line hook is the only idea in the room.
The setup
Mills (Adam Driver) is a pilot on a long-haul space mission, flying a load of passengers in cryosleep to earn money for his sick daughter back home. A field of debris tears his ship apart and drops him onto an unfamiliar world, where he discovers the only other survivor of the wreck is a young girl, Koa (Ariana Greenblatt), who does not speak his language. The planet, it turns out, is Earth, sixty-five million years before either of them was born, which makes the local wildlife a problem and the approaching asteroid a deadline. The two of them have to cross hostile terrain to reach the half of the ship that might still get them home.
That is the whole machine, and the film is honest about it. There is no twist economy here, no second mystery layered under the first. It is a walk from A to B with teeth in the undergrowth.
The cast
Driver is the reason this works as well as it does. He commits to it completely, playing Mills as a tired, grieving man rather than an action hero, and he sells the silence: long stretches of the film are one actor reacting to things that were not on set, and he carries them on physical conviction alone. It is a more interesting performance than the material strictly requires. Greenblatt has the harder job, acting across a language barrier so that most of her work is expression and trust, and she holds her own against him, the surrogate-daughter dynamic doing the emotional lifting the plot leaves bare. There is barely anyone else in the film, which is the point of the design, and the two-hander focus is one of its smarter choices.
The craft
Beck and Woods know how to stage a scare, and that training shows. The set pieces are built with patience: a sound, a stillness, a thing moving at the edge of the frame, then the release. The creatures are kept mostly in shadow, rain and half-light, which flatters the effects and keeps the menace abstract rather than rubbery. Salvatore Totino’s photography gives the prehistoric world a grim, overcast weight, all mud and mist rather than the bright wonder of a Jurassic film, and the score, with Danny Elfman among the credited hands, leans on tension over melody. At ninety-three minutes the thing is lean to a fault. It never outstays its welcome, but it also never pauses long enough to let the world or the people breathe.
How it stacks up
The obvious touchstone is Jurassic Park, and 65 loses that comparison on awe every time; Spielberg made you want to live in his theme park, and nobody is booking a holiday here. The film it actually resembles is Pitch Black, the lean survival horror of stranded humans crossing a deadly landscape between safe points, and it shares that film’s virtue of knowing exactly what it is. It also rhymes uncomfortably with After Earth, the other recent “father figure, child, hostile prehistoric-feeling planet, get to the second ship” picture, and 65 is the better of the two by some distance, mostly because Driver is a more grounded screen presence and the directors understand pace. Set against Beck and Woods’ own A Quiet Place, this is the lesser film: that one had a family, a world and rules you came to understand, where this has a corridor and a clock.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have been rough on it, parked around the mid-thirties, and the complaint is consistent: a thin script that does too little with a premise that promised so much. That is a fair charge. The film never finds a second gear of ideas, and a concept this fun arguably deserved more swagger and less gloom. Audiences are notably warmer, sitting near two-thirds, and I understand why. If you turn up wanting Adam Driver versus dinosaurs and a tight ninety minutes of jump and chase, the film delivers precisely that and does not waste your evening. The gap between the two scores is the gap between reviewing the film it could have been and watching the film it is.
Verdict
I land closer to the audience than the critics, because I judge a B-movie on whether it does its job, and this one does. It is well shot, genuinely tense in places, anchored by a better performance than it needed, and short enough to never drag. It is also forgettable: there is no world to return to, no character beyond the premise, and little here you will be turning over the next morning. That caps the rewatch value at “fine on a wet afternoon”. But it is competent, atmospheric, unpretentious genre cinema that knows its own limits, and I had a perfectly good time. 7⁄10.
Availability: In UK cinemas now. A disc and digital release will follow in the usual window after the theatrical run.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: 65 did modest business theatrically and has settled into exactly the reputation it earned at release, a clean B-movie carried by Adam Driver and remembered mostly for its one-line pitch. Its real life has been on streaming, where it found a far larger and warmer audience than the cinema run suggested, becoming one of those titles people stumble onto, enjoy and recommend. It now streams on the major platforms depending on region and is widely available on digital and disc.
BBFC content advice
Rated 15 by the BBFC for moderate threat, injury detail, fantasy violence. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: There are sequences of moderate fantasy violence in which characters fire automatic weapons at attacking monsters. When creatures are hit with blasts from a fantastical gun, the impact causes small blood spurts to erupt.
Threat and horror: Characters are frequently in danger from attacking creatures, who chase them and threaten their lives. There are a number of jump scare moments, though scenes of threat are interspersed throughout the film and broken up by gentler and lighter sequences.
Language: There is use of mild and very mild bad language (‘shit’, ‘damn’).
Injury detail: Bloody injury occurs when a man removes a sharp piece of metal from his body. After a creature is badly burned, there is sight of its gory and burned corpse. There is also brief sight of dead bodies lying on the ground.
Suicide and self-harm: A character briefly contemplates taking his own life.
Theme: There are scenes of mild emotional upset in which characters grieve for lost loved ones. There are undetailed references to illness.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
