65 Review: A tepid exploration of a fun idea with first-draft treatment

65 tells the story of a spaceship pilot who crash-lands on an extremely hostile, primitive planet, and must survive and also save the sole survivor of his ship. The planet he gets stranded on is earth, only 65 million years ago when it was ruled by the dinosaurs. While we fail to grasp the title’s reasoning beyond the obvious, we understand one thing; along with the dinosaurs–who enjoyed a vivacious film career in the 90s with the Jurassic Park series– the makers have also brought back other things from the time period like the (now outdated) sci-fi tropes and sloppy visual effects. 

With the problems of the film slowly emerging as the story unravels, it however manages to incite our curiosity with a sufficiently fun and comfortably simple premise. A man from a futuristic civilization, trying to escape from a prehistoric earth populated by dinosaurs might sound like the perfect marriage of subgenres like a survival thriller along with space exploration sci-fi (Star Trek). There have been films that successfully exploited elements of such an idea like Predator and Alien, and some have failed at this task like After Earth. It doesn’t take long for us to realise that, although not as bad, 65 still leans to the side of After Earth. Because, in 65, any entertaining story beats that might naturally arise out of the idea it rides on, are treated with such apathy that any chance of engaging with the film is quashed by 65’s own total lack of interest in itself.

The first symptom of the string of uninspired creative choices in the film is its production design, which can be observed at the beginning of the film. Adam Driver’s character wears a spacesuit that looks no better than a weather suit with pipes stuck randomly around it. The futuristic weapons used by our protagonist involve a laser gun with a touch screen and a pouch full of exploding balls. There is an obvious attempt to conceal the inadequacies of the subpar CGI work by concealing the dinosaurs with shadows and smoke and if that is not enough, the creatures are relegated to the background and are out of focus most of the time. 

There is definitive evidence of Adam Driver attempting to give his all with his performance but the one-dimensionality of the character ultimately throttles his efforts. Throughout the (thankfully) concise runtime of the film, at regular intervals, the film elevates tension, seeking to provide a thrill to the audience by placing the characters in danger but these moments are designed in a way to offer the least amount of tension and ergo thrills. The characters escape from the dangers as easily as they get themselves into it, there is no ingenuity in the way these supposed peaks in action are handled. 

There are times when you neither want to be thrilled by a film nor are you willing to sink into a character-driven drama. There are times when you just want a succession of images to flow by as you zone out of conscious thinking. 65, for all its casual disregard for focused filmmaking, still does not feel like it had malicious intent to punish us for choosing to watch the film with egregious displays of inadequacy. There is a much better action entertainer buried beneath all the sloppy execution but unlike the palaeontologists, nobody has the patience to dig through 65 million-year-old deposits of dirt to find out what happened to the dinosaurs because after patiently watching Adam Driver trek through the forest for hours, you too start wondering about what happened to the dinosaurs.

While 65 does have the essence of much better films like Predator and Alien, the blend of that essence has unfortunately been watered down with what feels like 65 million litres of water.