It’s also cringe-inducing and not much fun.
The ad team for Spielberg’s Jurassic Park lived up to that movie’s wit when they devised the campaign slogan “An Adventure 65 Million Years in the Making.” But the makers of the new dinosaur movie 65 are not so clever, given their presumption that audiences old enough to remember that classic, 30-year-old slogan won’t be insulted by the borrowing. Like 65’s copycat dinosaurs, the entire film’s intellectual-property theft is, to borrow another cliché, cringe.
65 might be the first film ever based on a movie poster. Its unoriginality and witlessness follow the blatancy of most contemporary content: An astronaut named Mills (Adam Driver) is introduced as a partner in an interracial marriage and the father of a biracial daughter, Nevine (Chloe Coleman). Mills volunteers for a two-year research mission to finance a costly medical procedure Nevine needs. Traveling through space, he enters an asteroid belt and crash-lands on a distant planet that, we’re told, existed 65 million years earlier.
This isn’t a story about time travel or slipping into a Twilight Zone alternate universe. These are story points. Mills comes across a young girl of ambiguous ethnicity, Koa (Ariana Greenblatt), stranded and orphaned from a previous crash, and protects her from the strange planet’s prehistoric behemoths. But unexplained story points prevent the father-daughter bonding from achieving poetic symbolism. Mills and Koa are put through a gauntlet of monster confrontations and chase scenes — opportunities for digital flexing by the F/X team. This is what was wrought by the exploitation of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Disney’s destruction of the Star Wars franchise, and Spielberg’s own self-defeating neglect of the Jurassic Park sequels: copycat content that feels no shame and sees no end.
We can’t pretend to not know this. Nor should we ignore the pop-culture decline it portends. 65 was written and directed by the team Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who previously wrote the script of the inane A Quiet Place. Beck and Woods may be sci-fi/horror nerds, but they’re humorless, unskilled genre clones. Despite tutelage from producer Sam Raimi, Beck and Woods seem overwhelmed by the project’s commercial potential. Running from and zapping dinos is serious business. Unlike Raimi’s semi-satirical Evil Dead 2, 65 is grim and somber — like Denis Villeneuve’s disappointing Arrival.
Beck and Woods’s conceit, in which the future and prehistory meet, lacks any spiritual or philosophical dimension. These naïve kids must be at the building-block stage of multiverse world-building — which The Lego Movie sequels already quickly exhausted.
The spectacle of CGI dinos and velociraptors prowling and growling, of Mills and Koa running, falling, tripping, and colliding, is relentless and tiresome, even at 90 minutes. Their momentary injuries defy physics. Imagine the Road Runner cartoons minus the wonder of slapstick. 65 becomes knockabout farce but with that nagging insistence on parental guilt, racial anxiety linked to evolutionary quandary and generational danger.
In 65, Beck, Woods, and Raimi unapologetically replicate what was done to us during Covid (getting away with knockabout dystopia) and what’s still being done to us politically — and it’s no fun. Dinosaurs may be extinct, but there are still monsters in Hollywood.
