65 (2023)

Rating: 7.1

TL;DR - 65 is not as bad as you’ve heard! In fact, it’s surprisingly watchable, and quite entertaining and tense at times. But while it isn’t that bad it isn’t great either… and wastes a really cool premise. Overall it’s “just fine” and can be pretty dull, generic and forgettable.

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Film Info:

Premise: After a catastrophic crash on an unknown planet, pilot Mills quickly discovers he's actually stranded on Earth -- 65 million years ago. Now, with only one chance at a rescue, Mills and the only other survivor, Koa, must make their way across an unknown terrain riddled with dangerous prehistoric creatures.

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Sony - Columbia Pictures

Written & Directed by Scott Beck & Bryan Woods

Cast: Adam Driver, Ariana Greenblatt

Runtime: 1hr 33min

Rating: 14A

Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi, Thriller

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IMDb Rating: 5.7/10

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 35%

RT Audience Score: 63%

RT Critic Average: 4.8/10

RT Audience Average: 3.6/5

Metacritic Score: 40

CinemaScore: C+

Letterboxd: 2.5/5

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Fun Fact: The film was shot in 40 days, as compared to the Jurassic World movies which have over 100 days of filming.

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Review:

written by Tyler Park

To my surprise, 65 is actually a perfectly watchable movie! It’s actually not as bad as I thought it would be and can be quite entertaining at times. But… and yes, there is most definitely a but… there’s an issue when the highest praise you can give a film is that it’s “surprisingly watchable”. I’m not willing to call it good, but it’s certainly not as bad as you might think!

The movie does feel a bit like a first draft — like the writers came up with this really cool sci-fi premise but didn’t know what to do with it. And that’s super disappointing, as these writers wrote the excellent script for A Quiet Place. So what happened? They managed to craft a few entertaining, tense scenes, but overall wrote what turned into a very dull, generic, and forgettable sci-fi movie. There were so many instances where the script felt half-baked, and I could see what they were going for but it just didn’t work. It’s never horrible or unwatchable, but it’s just so standard, it’s all stuff we’ve seen done better before. Heck, if you want all this dinosaur action just go to the Jurassic Park movies! This one just squanders its premise, and honestly didn’t even have enough dinosaur scenes. Plus it really needed a bigger cast so we could have some expendable characters for the dinosaurs to eat.

The CGI for the dinosaurs was not bad, but for all the space stuff it looked relatively cheap. And you could tell in multiple instances that the filmmakers were shooting the film in such a way that it would minimize the number of shots with dinosaurs in it. But this actually kinda worked for me, it helped to build tension and anticipation of when the Dinos would eventually be shown. There were even a few good jump scares that got me! And the end action scene actually did work quite well, possibly even better than the finale of Jurassic World Dominion!

The story is essentially prehistoric Last of Us, which proves two things: one, this movie could have worked much better, and two, there’s a show out there that just did this so much better. It did have some cool action with dinosaurs, but severely lacked the important character elements that make you connect with and care about the story and the conflict that the characters are in. Adam Driver is good, he always does his best even with lackluster material to work with. I just really think the movie needed something more besides the central hook of it taking place on prehistoric earth. (Minor qualm here: they should have saved that reveal for the movie, it would have been cool to realize that this alien planet they were on was Earth 65 million years ago while watching the movie.)

It just didn’t feel like the filmmakers were trying too hard and it felt so underdeveloped, I was left wanting a little more. There was so much potential in its premise, you almost wonder how they missed the mark so badly. Still, I can’t complain too much because I was entertained, and it really was only 90 minutes long so it went by quickly. I love getting original sci-fi movies like this, I just wish they could turn out better. It’s a perfectly fine movie, but I’ll bet that I will have forgotten about it by next week.

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Trailer: