--Mills, 65
65 manages to be more than a clone of Jurassic Park thanks to the setting of the distant past, the distinctive physical appearances of the dinosaurs, the threat of an impending asteroid crash, and the very minimalistic cast. Reaching for much more of a horror tone than one with the awe and spectacle of Jurassic Park, it has its faults, namely its underuse of certain elements, yet the very small scope of the story works in favor of focusing on atmosphere over constant bombardment with dinosaurs. Adam Driver is predictably more than capable of taking on a lead role of the sort where he is one of literally just two characters that are shown for more than a few minutes at most. Ultimately, his performance, the slow-burn approach to featuring the dinosaurs, and certain camera shots are the best of 65, the rest being more middling or having just enough quality to keep the film stable.
Production Values
Flashes of great talent with the framing or choreography of scenes are to be found here, such as when a holographic projection from an advanced scanner shows a brawl between Adam Driver's character and a cave-dwelling dinosaur as it occurs just offscreen. The buildup to and the reveal of a therapod lurking outside of a cave as rain falls is another such example. More shots like this could have given 65 additional uniqueness. Even so, the cast is fairly uniquely small, consisting almost exclusively of Adam Driver and the much younger Ariana Greenblatt, Driver being the stronger performer than Greenblatt. Given the approximately 90 minute runtime, Adam Driver actually gets to show everything from suicidal tendencies to grief to desperation to fierce determination well. Ariana Greenblatt, in contrast, has more restrictions on what she can communicate since her character does not speak the same language as Driver's Mills (which is presented as English even though it might really be an alien language much unlike Earth's English 65 million years after the onscreen events). Also, her character is involved heavily in one of the strangest developments: at one point, she leaps out at a massive dinosaur using a large tooth as a weapon, appearing quite far from her last seen location just in time to save Mills, and coming from a different direction than she started from. As an actress, she does at least a passable job. As a character, more could have been done with her, and without using such extremely unlikely plot contrivances as her rescue of the main character.
Story
Some spoilers are below.
Mills, a member of an alien species that looks identical to humans as far as is shown, leaves his wife and daughter on his home planet of Somaris in order to earn enough money to pay for the daughter's medical treatments. It is never specified what she suffers from, only that her condition is serious and that Mills chooses to serve as a pilot for cryo-passengers for two years to secure the money. His vessel winds up thrown off of its course by asteroids. Crashing on Earth at the end of the Cretaceous period, he finds only one of the sleeping passengers has survived, and he protects the young girl from dinosaurs as they move towards a spacecraft version of what could be used as a lifeboat, which was broken off from his ship during its violent landing.
Intellectual Content
Woven into parts of 65 are great ideological or storytelling concepts. Humanoid aliens that are outwardly indistinguishable from humans, while portrayed well in other science fiction films like Man of Steel, are in one sense a clever way to have Adam Driver's Mills on Earth in the late age of dinosaurs in an implied evolutionary universe--without resorting to some kind of time travel disaster. Having the child healthcare of his homeworld Somaris be implicitly too expensive to obtain without a two year piloting voyage, during which his daughter actually dies due to her illness, is a great way to touch upon the very predatory, counterproductive nature of locking lifesaving medical care behind multiple years' worth of compensation. The shortcoming is that 65 could have explored some of these things more thoroughly, the former by revealing more of the uncommunicated lore and the latter by doing more with the economic barriers to survival and flourishing than using them as a means to jumpstart the plot. As a combination of mild horror and science fiction, this movie does a better job with atmosphere than it does at going beyond the bare minimum with some of its more abstract themes.
Conclusion
Adam Driver shines in multiple instances across many kinds of films, from the role of Kylo Ren in the sequel Star Wars trilogy to that of a more sinister villain in The Last Duel. With silence, sparse dialogue, and tenderness towards his character's biological daughter and the daughter figure on Earth with him, he at least makes the most of his presence in 65 despite the issues with the unnecessarily short 90 minute runtime and the missed opportunities for more worldbuilding or, more importantly, philosophical examination. What 65 does, it does competently enough overall to make it a much better movie than many said upon its release. It is a good film that could have been better rather than nothing but squandered opportunities. Due to his strong acting here and elsewhere, Adam Driver should do just fine as his career continues despite the sometimes erroneously mixed reactions the general movie met with.
Content:
1. Violence: Gunshots and physical strikes are frequent in more than one scene. Like many PG-13 movies, there is still nothing graphic.
2. Profanity: "Shit" and "damn" are very rarely used.
No comments:
Post a Comment