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You’d think a movie in which Adam Driver fights a bunch of dinosaurs couldn’t possibly be boring, but that’s exactly what “65” is.

This is a movie that would have benefitted from being a whole lot stupider. The big-budget sci-fi flick—which reportedly cost $91 million to make and was featured in a Super Bowl ad—should have embraced its inherent B-movie roots. Instead, it tries to juggle a wild survival story with a poignant family drama, but both elements feel so rushed and underdeveloped that neither ends up registering. There’s nothing to these characters, and the action sequences quickly grow repetitive and wearisome. There’s a jump scare, insistent notes from an overbearing score, some running and screaming, the gnashing of teeth, and maybe an injury before a narrow escape. Over and over and over again.

But the film from the writing-directing team of Scott Beck and Bryan Woods , whose credits include co-writing “ A Quiet Place ” with John Krasinski , offers an intriguingly contradictory premise. It takes place 65 million years ago, but suggests that futuristic civilizations existed back then on planets throughout the universe. On one of them, Driver stars as a space pilot named Mills. He’s about to embark on a two-year exploratory mission in order to afford medical treatment for his ailing daughter ( Chloe Coleman from “ My Spy ,” who’s featured in the film’s prelude and sporadic video snippets).

On the way to his destination, the ship Mills is flying enters an unexpected asteroid field, gets torn to shreds, and crashes. All of the passengers in cryogenic sleep are killed—except one, who just happens to be a girl around the same age as his daughter. Her name is Koa, and she’s played by Ariana Greenblatt . And the planet, which has swampy terrain reminiscent of Dagobah, just happens to be—wait for it—Earth.

“65” requires Mills and Koa to schlep from the wreckage to a mountaintop so they can commandeer the escape pod that’s perched there and fly out before dinosaurs can stomp and chomp on them. The creatures can be startling at times, but at other times they look so cheesy and fake, they’re like the animatronics you’d see at a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant. And yet! It almost would have been better—or at least more entertaining—if “65” had leaned harder into that silliness if it had played with the basic ridiculousness of mixing complex technology with the Cretaceous period. They rarely use Mills’ advanced gadgets in any inspired ways within this prehistoric setting. The few attempts at humor fall flat—they mainly consist of Koa making fun of Mills for being uptight—and moments of peril wrap up too tidily for us to luxuriate in their anxiety.

Worst of all, Driver doesn’t get to ham it up nearly enough here. He’s an actor of great intensity, which can be both thrilling and amusing if he’s amping it up in a knowing way. Imagine him screaming “More!!!” as he’s blasting Luke Skywalker in “ Star Wars: The Last Jedi ,” or punching a wall during an argument in “ Marriage Story .” But the man he plays in “65” is blandly heroic and just seems generally annoyed. Greenblatt, meanwhile, does the best she can with a character we know absolutely nothing about. Koa speaks a language that’s not English, so most of her exchanges with Mills consist of mimicking the basic words he says to her, including “family.” There’s no real bond between them, but neither is there any sort of prickly tension since they’re stuck with each other. “The Last of Us,” this is not.

Beck and Woods offer some clever camerawork here and there, but also some erratic editing choices. And they borrow quite a bit from the “ Jurassic Park ” franchise: a giant footprint in the mud or a dinosaur’s yellow eye leering menacingly through a window. But maybe that’s inevitable at this point. Their film only gets truly enjoyably nutty toward the end, with its climactic combination of a sneaky quicksand patch, a ravenous Tyrannosaurus rex, a well-timed geyser eruption, and a catastrophic asteroid shower. But by then, it’s too late for us—and the planet.

Now in theaters.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Rated PG-13 for intense sci-fi action and peril, and brief bloody images.

Adam Driver as Mills

Ariana Greenblatt as Koa

Chloe Coleman as Nevine

Nika King as Alya

Bryan Woods

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Salvatore Totino
Chris Bacon

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65 review – Adam Driver v dinosaurs in almost fun enough thriller

A scrappy adventure, shot two years ago and getting unceremoniously dumped, isn’t as bad as its backstory would suggest but it’s missing something

I t’s almost impossible sitting down to watch the loopy sci-fi thriller 65 without being niggled by a familiar sinking feeling, like you’re about to eat a meal that you know won’t agree with your system. Despite the intriguing presence of Adam Driver , whose post-Star Wars roles have typically prioritised art over commerce, and a magnetically gonzo premise that sees a pilot crash-land on prehistoric Earth, it’s arriving weighed down by baggage heavy enough to flatten any hopes the thrillingly nutty trailer might have inspired.

Not only has the film, shot two years ago, already missed five prior release dates but it’s landing last minute without much of a visible campaign (it was only officially scheduled last month) and almost entirely without screenings for critics (I attended the only one in New York, taking place just hours before release). Inevitably, this then lowers even the most optimistic of optimist’s expectations to beneath ground level, a cursed backstory for something seemingly so awful that studio Sony would rather bury it than have anyone actually watch it. But as is often the case with such a lead-in, it’s more ho-hum than horrible, a mess but not a hugely embarrassing one.

Perhaps if it had been truly tell-everyone-on-Twitter terrible, then maybe it would at least be remembered by the time it swiftly lands on plane movie rotation but 65 veers between fine and slightly less than, never quite bringing the fun we were expecting,

Unusually, for an elevator pitch genre film such as this, it starts off in far shakier territory than where it ends up. Driver’s pilot, Mills, is saying goodbye to his wife and sick daughter (cue performed light cough) before he goes on a two-year mission. Shot during early Covid, we rush through the scene-setting to avoid anything that might prove logistically difficult for what’s essentially a two-hander, an understandable sacrifice given the time, but the frantic pace continues once he crash-lands on a mysterious planet, clumsily sprinting us through what should have been a more delicately effective buildup. The first act has the feeling of something that caused sleepless nights in the edit suite, jankily jumbled together, short and choppy scenes ending before they should, giving it a distractingly arrhythmic quality (criminally, the discovery that the planet contains dinosaurs (!) is truly fumbled). Once Mills finds a fellow survivor (an excellent, understated Ariana Greenblatt), the pair must make their way across dangerous terrain to an escape pod.

It’s a pretty unremarkable survival movie from then on, but efficiently so in the shortest of bursts, thanks to a physically committed Driver taking it all rather seriously and some moments of decent enough jeopardy. We’re teased something gnarlier, something that might have distanced it even further from the family-friendly Jurassic Park franchise other than quality and budget, but it’s all a little too restrained to be the extreme and extremely silly B-movie it could and should have been. One tellingly funny scene has Greenblatt’s cute kid rescue a friendly dinosaur before it gets promptly ripped apart by others but that’s as knowingly nasty as it gets – we’re otherwise stuck with a makeshift family melodrama squeezed in between some mostly unscary scare sequences. Rather than build up genuine suspense, as writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods did in their breakout script for A Quiet Place, as writer-directors here they rely on an annoying overdose of jump scares, most of which cause yawns rather than jolts. In the slightly more involving final act, Beck and Woods lean further into the goofiness of their premise, as danger starts quite literally falling out of the sky, but it’s a case of too little, too late.

It’s not quite the toxic disaster it’s being treated as but 65 is nowhere near the giddy lark it should have been, crash-landing somewhere in the middle instead.

65 is out in UK and US cinemas on 10 March

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An astronaut crash lands on a mysterious planet only to discover he's not alone. An astronaut crash lands on a mysterious planet only to discover he's not alone. An astronaut crash lands on a mysterious planet only to discover he's not alone.

Bryan Woods
Adam Driver
Ariana Greenblatt
Chloe Coleman
926 User reviews
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40 Metascore
1 nomination

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Trivia The warning sound made by the ship's computer just after the crash was first used as the sound effect for the Martian walkers in The War of the Worlds (1953) .
Goofs At exactly 21:48 Mills is walking through some pine trees and the tree on his left has a red spray paint marking on it. The trailer reveals that these marks were made by Mills. However the scene was scrapped. (He later uses this powder substance to draw a map in it.)

Mills : It's not because of you; it's for you!

Crazy credits The TSG Entertainment logo dissolves into stars in space, leading directly into the opening shot of the movie, which is a long pan through celestial wonders of space, until the planet Somaris comes into view.
Connections Featured in AniMat's Crazy Cartoon Cast: Part of Halle's World (2022)

User reviews 926

Foutainoflife
Apr 26, 2023
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March 10, 2023 (United States)
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$45,000,000 (estimated)
$32,062,904
$12,328,361
Mar 12, 2023
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Runtime 1 hour 33 minutes
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Review: There are ‘65’ million reasons to avoid the new Adam Driver dinosaur space flick

A man in a futuristic outfit holding a gun-like weapon and standing outdoors

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If you asked the AI program ChatGPT to write a dinosaur/space movie as if Steven Spielberg and James Cameron were trying to make fun of each other, you’d probably still get something more entertaining than the thudding hack job “65,” a movie about as thrilling as watching footage of someone — in this case, Adam Driver and his young co-star, Ariana Greenblatt — on the “Jurassic Park” ride at Universal Studios .

The writers of “A Quiet Place” — Scott Beck and Bryan Woods — are clearly not done with monsters and family and the apocalypse. But this time, as directors too, they’ve decided to take us not forward but back, to when a routine trip went disastrously wrong. Think “Gilligan’s Island.” Not because it’s like “65.” Just because it’s more entertaining than “65.”

For your safety

The Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic . Because moviegoing carries risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the CDC and local health officials .

Do you like introductory text that removes that nagging worry that you won’t be expositionally satisfied? Because “65” has that. “BEFORE THE ADVENT OF MANKIND” reads the first. “IN THE INFINITY OF SPACE” reads the next, which is, by the way, set against the backdrop of … space. Just so everything’s clear! And later, after a sentient audience will have guessed from the huge dinosaur footprint that exploratory mission pilot Mills (Driver) has been stranded on a particular planet at a very particular time, here come the words: “A VISITOR CRASH LANDED ON EARTH.” Yes, that “65” refers to the number of millions of years ago. Not, as one might hope, the number of minutes in the film.

Do you like stories about absent dads? Based on the movies, they seem to be an emotional connection between humanity’s meager time on Earth and social systems in long-ago galaxies. (“ChatGPT, add George Lucas in the mix.”) By taking one more gig, Driver’s character not only leaves behind an adoring wife but, more urgently, an adoring and ailing daughter (Chloe Coleman), whose hologram messages of love, longing and increasing sickness are like stabs to his heart as he’s trying to avoid dinosaur teeth stabbing everywhere else on his body. So, if you wanted to give him only one human companion to heighten that guilty-father feeling, out of all the possible cryogenically frozen passengers to survive an inconvenient ship crash, who would you pick? A grandmother? Wrong! “ChatGPT, are you familiar with ‘The Last of Us ’?”

A man carrying a weapon walks into a cave alongside a young woman

Do you like made-up tongues not translated because it’s cuter when an othered figure learns English? Maybe Beck and Woods just didn’t feel like writing dialogue for the girl, Koa (Greenblatt), that would help establish this child as a person beyond at first seeming like a feral creature and then a surrogate daughter. Dialogue is hard! So instead this poor character gets an untranslated language until she can trigger “aww’s” by learning the words “home” and “family” and, with stick figures, inventing cave art.

Do you think Adam Driver can do anything? He might have thought that too, when signing on for this.

Do you believe that dinosaurs have long since outlived their CGI-rendered ability to instill awe and terror? Because the filmmakers seem pretty convinced 172 “Jurassic Park” movies haven’t already been made. Sometimes that kind of innocence inspires reinvention. Sometimes it just means that once majestic, still mysterious and endlessly fascinating creatures begin to feel like faceless goons in a video game.

Do you occasionally wish that studios would run dank-looking movies that seem stripped of color through a Snapchat-like filter that would add bright, rainbow-hued tails, faces, starbursts, pizzazz-y augmentations and the like? I’m not saying there are quickie backlot black-and-white adventure movies from 90 years ago with more visual breadth, color range and compositional tension than “65,” but, OK, well, yes, I am saying that.

Is “65” a hall-of-fame bad movie? No, and that may be its problem. It’s just pedestrian dumb and dull. It drops humans from eons away and ago into an extinction-level event, and instead of being full-on weird and wondrous about it, prefers to be utterly imitative and complacent. Way to extinguish yourself.

'65'

Rated: PG-13, for intense sci-fi action and peril, and brief bloody images Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes Playing: In general release

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’65’ review: adam driver fights dinosaurs in an underwhelming sci-fi actioner.

An astronaut from another planet and a little girl find themselves battling dinos on Earth 65 million years ago in this film from the writers of 'A Quiet Place.'

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‘Oppenheimer’ Review: A Man for Our Time

Christopher Nolan’s complex, vivid portrait of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” is a brilliant achievement in formal and conceptual terms.

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‘Oppenheimer’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The writer and director christopher nolan narrates the opening sequence from the film, starring cillian murphy..

Hi, I’m Christopher Nolan director, writer, and co-producer of “Oppenheimer.” Opening with the raindrops on the water came late to myself and Jen Lane in the edit suite. But ultimately, it became a motif that runs the whole way through the film. Became very important. These opening images of the detonation at Trinity are based on the real footage. Andrew Jackson, our visual effects supervisor, put them together using analog methods to try and reproduce the incredible frame rates that their technology allowed at the time, superior to what we have today. Adapting Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s book “American Prometheus,” I fully embraced the Prometheun theme, but ultimately chose to change the title to “Oppenheimer” to give a more direct idea of what the film was going to be about and whose point of view we’re seeing. And here we have Cillian Murphy with an IMAX camera inches from his nose. Hoyte van Hoytema was incredible. IMAX camera revealing everything. And I think, to some degree, applying the pressure to Cillian as Oppenheimer that this hearing was applying. “Yes, your honor.” “We’re not judges, Doctor.” “Oh.” And behind him, out of focus, the great Emily Blunt who’s going to become so important to the film as Kitty Oppenheimer, who gradually comes more into focus over the course of the first reel. We divided the two timelines into fission and fusion, the two different approaches to releasing nuclear energy in this devastating form to try and suggest to the audience the two different timelines. And then embraced black-and-white shooting here. Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss being shot on IMAX black-and-white film. The first time anyone’s ever shot that film. Made especially for us. And he’s here talking to Alden Ehrenreich who is absolutely indicative of the incredible ensemble that our casting director John Papsidera put together. Robert Downey Jr. utterly transformed, I think, not just in terms of appearance, but also in terms of approach to character, stripping away years of very well-developed charisma to just try and inhabit the skin of a somewhat awkward, sometimes venal, but also charismatic individual, and losing himself in this utterly. And then as we come up to this door, we go into the Senate hearing rooms. And we try to give that as much visibility, grandeur, and glamour to contrast with the security hearing that’s so claustrophobic. And takes Oppenheimer completely out of the limelight. [CROWD SHOUTING]

By Manohla Dargis

“Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s staggering film about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man known as “the father of the atomic bomb,” condenses a titanic shift in consciousness into three haunted hours. A drama about genius, hubris and error, both individual and collective, it brilliantly charts the turbulent life of the American theoretical physicist who helped research and develop the two atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II — cataclysms that helped usher in our human-dominated age.

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The movie is based on “ American Prometheus : The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” the authoritative 2005 biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Written and directed by Nolan, the film borrows liberally from the book as it surveys Oppenheimer’s life, including his role in the Manhattan Engineer District, better known as the Manhattan Project. He served as director of a clandestine weapons lab built in a near-desolate stretch of Los Alamos, in New Mexico, where he and many other of the era’s most dazzling scientific minds puzzled through how to harness nuclear reactions for the weapons that killed tens of thousands instantly, ending the war in the Pacific.

The atomic bomb and what it wrought define Oppenheimer’s legacy and also shape this film. Nolan goes deep and long on the building of the bomb, a fascinating and appalling process, but he doesn’t restage the attacks; there are no documentary images of the dead or panoramas of cities in ashes, decisions that read as his ethical absolutes. The horror of the bombings, the magnitude of the suffering they caused and the arms race that followed suffuse the film. “Oppenheimer” is a great achievement in formal and conceptual terms, and fully absorbing, but Nolan’s filmmaking is, crucially, in service to the history that it relates.

The story tracks Oppenheimer — played with feverish intensity by Cillian Murphy — across decades, starting in the 1920s with him as a young adult and continuing until his hair grays. The film touches on personal and professional milestones, including his work on the bomb, the controversies that dogged him, the anti-Communist attacks that nearly ruined him, as well as the friendships and romances that helped sustain yet also troubled him. He has an affair with a political firebrand named Jean Tatlock (a vibrant Florence Pugh), and later weds a seductive boozer, Kitty Harrison (Emily Blunt, in a slow-building turn), who accompanies him to Los Alamos, where she gives birth to their second child.

A man in shadow stands beside an atomic bomb inside a shed in a desolate desert.

It’s a dense, event-filled story that Nolan — who’s long embraced the plasticity of the film medium — has given a complex structure, which he parcels into revealing sections. Most are in lush color; others in high-contrast black and white. These sections are arranged in strands that wind together for a shape that brings to mind the double helix of DNA. To signal his conceit, he stamps the film with the words “fission” (a splitting into parts) and “fusion” (a merging of elements); Nolan being Nolan, he further complicates the film by recurrently kinking up the overarching chronology — it is a lot.

It also isn’t a story that builds gradually; rather, Nolan abruptly tosses you into the whirl of Oppenheimer’s life with vivid scenes of him during different periods. In rapid succession the watchful older Oppie (as his intimates call him) and his younger counterpart flicker onscreen before the story briefly lands in the 1920s, where he’s an anguished student tormented by fiery, apocalyptic visions. He suffers; he also reads T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” drops a needle on Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” and stands before a Picasso painting, defining works of an age in which physics folded space and time into space-time .

This fast pace and narrative fragmentation continue as Nolan fills in this Cubistic portrait, crosses and recrosses continents and ushers in armies of characters, including Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), a physicist who played a role in the Manhattan Project. Nolan has loaded the movie with familiar faces — Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Gary Oldman — some distracting. It took me a while to accept the director Benny Safdie as Edward Teller, the theoretical physicist known as the “father of the hydrogen bomb,” and I still don’t know why Rami Malek shows up in a minor part other than he’s yet another known commodity.

As Oppenheimer comes into focus so does the world. In 1920s Germany, he learns quantum physics; the next decade he’s at Berkeley teaching, bouncing off other young geniuses and building a center for the study of quantum physics. Nolan makes the era’s intellectual excitement palpable — Einstein published his theory of general relativity in 1915 — and, as you would expect, there’s a great deal of scientific debate and chalkboards filled with mystifying calculations, most of which Nolan translates fairly comprehensibly. One of the film’s pleasures is experiencing by proxy the kinetic excitement of intellectual discourse.

It’s at Berkeley that the trajectory of Oppenheimer’s life dramatically shifts, after news breaks that Germany has invaded Poland. By that point, he has become friends with Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), a physicist who invented a particle accelerator, the cyclotron , and who plays an instrumental role in the Manhattan Project. It’s also at Berkeley that Oppenheimer meets the project’s military head, Leslie Groves (a predictably good Damon), who makes him Los Alamos’s director, despite the leftist causes he supported — among them, the fight against fascism during the Spanish Civil War — and some of his associations, including with Communist Party members like his brother, Frank (Dylan Arnold).

Nolan is one of the few contemporary filmmakers operating at this ambitious scale, both thematically and technically. Working with his superb cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, Nolan has shot in 65-millimeter film (which is projected in 70-millimeter), a format that he’s used before to create a sense of cinematic monumentality. The results can be immersive, though at times clobbering, particularly when the wow of his spectacle has proved more substantial and coherent than his storytelling. In “Oppenheimer,” though, as in “ Dunkirk ” (2017), he uses the format to convey the magnitude of a world-defining event; here, it also closes the distance between you and Oppenheimer, whose face becomes both vista and mirror.

The film’s virtuosity is evident in every frame, but this is virtuosity without self-aggrandizement. Big subjects can turn even well-intended filmmakers into show-offs, to the point that they upstage the history they seek to do justice to. Nolan avoids that trap by insistently putting Oppenheimer into a larger context, notably with the black-and-white portions. One section turns on a politically motivated security clearance hearing in 1954, a witch hunt that damaged his reputation; the second follows the 1959 confirmation for Lewis Strauss (a mesmerizing, near-unrecognizable Downey), a former chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission who was nominated for a cabinet position.

Nolan integrates these black-and-white sections with the color ones, using scenes from the hearing and the confirmation — Strauss’s role in the hearing and his relationship with Oppenheimer directly affected the confirmation’s outcome — to create a dialectical synthesis. One of the most effective examples of this approach illuminates how Oppenheimer and other Jewish project scientists, some of whom were refugees from Nazi Germany, saw their work in stark, existential terms. Yet Oppenheimer’s genius, his credentials, international reputation and wartime service to the United States government cannot save him from political gamesmanship, the vanity of petty men and the naked antisemitism of the Red scare.

These black-and-white sequences define the last third of “Oppenheimer.” They can seem overlong, and at times in this part of the film it feels as if Nolan is becoming too swept up in the trials that America’s most famous physicist experienced. Instead, it is here that the film’s complexities and all its many fragments finally converge as Nolan puts the finishing touches on his portrait of a man who contributed to an age of transformational scientific discovery, who personified the intersection of science and politics, including in his role as a Communist boogeyman, who was transformed by his role in the creation of weapons of mass destruction and soon after raised the alarm about the dangers of nuclear war.

François Truffaut once wrote that “war films, even pacifist, even the best, willingly or not, glorify war and render it in some way attractive.” This, I think, gets at why Nolan refuses to show the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, world-defining events that eventually killed an estimated 100,000 to upward of 200,000 souls. You do, though, see Oppenheimer watch the first test bomb and, critically, you also hear the famous words that he said crossed his mind as the mushroom cloud rose: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” As Nolan reminds you, the world quickly moved on from the horrors of the war to embrace the bomb. Now we, too, have become death, the destroyers of worlds.

Oppenheimer Rated R for disturbing images, and adult language and behavior. Running time: 3 hours. In theaters.

Audio produced by Kate Winslett .

An earlier version of this article misidentified J. Robert Oppenheimer as director of the Manhattan Project. He was director of its clandestine weapons laboratory, Los Alamos.

How we handle corrections

Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic of The Times, which she joined in 2004. She has an M.A. in cinema studies from New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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65 review: a simple, bare-bones sci-fi thriller

“65 is a simple but effective sci-fi thriller that, thankfully, doesn't overstay its welcome.”

Adam Driver's committed lead performance
A lean 93-minute runtime
Several intense, clever action sequences
A messy, unpolished visual style
An overly familiar story

The new movie 65 is a refreshingly unambitious sci-fi blockbuster.

Written and directed by A Quiet Place writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, the film is a straightforward, tight thriller that’s interested in little more than forcing its star, Adam Driver, to repeatedly fight a bunch of dinosaurs and other dangerous prehistoric creatures. The film employs no more visual effects than it absolutely needs, and it consistently makes strong use of its real-life environments and locations — most of which prove to be far more dangerous than they initially seem. In case its tight 93-minute runtime didn’t already make this clear: 65 doesn’t have any franchise aspirations, either.

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The film’s world-building is concise and efficiently delivered, and Beck and Woods’ screenplay doesn’t ever seem in danger of becoming obsessed with the kind of fictional minutiae or sci-fi gobbledygook that drag down so many other modern blockbusters. Its safeness and limited scope undoubtedly prevent 65 from rising to any truly great heights. However, there’s also something thrilling about the way 65 calls back to the days in which Hollywood’s sci-fi blockbusters could still be self-contained adventures that ask no more of their viewers than 90 minutes of their undivided attention.

As is alluded to by its title, 65 takes place around 65 million years ago and centers on Mills (Driver), a work-for-hire space pilot from a distant, technologically advanced planet. The film’s simple opening scene establishes Mills’ decision to take on a two-year transport mission in order to pay for the expensive medical treatments needed by his sick daughter, Nevine (Chloe Coleman). In its next scene, 65 catches up with Mills’ fateful mission as it’s upended by an asteroid field that damages Mills’ ship and sends him and his passengers crashing onto a nearby, uncharted terrestrial planet.

In the wake of the crash, Mills discovers that all but one of his cryogenically asleep passengers were killed by the destruction of his ship. Mills finds and wakes up the crash’s only other survivor, a young foreign girl named Koa (Ariana Greenblatt), who unfortunately doesn’t speak the same language as Driver’s skilled pilot. Determined to make sure that Koa gets back home safely, Mills takes her on a multiday journey to his ship’s escape vessel, which landed over a dozen kilometers away from where he and Koa ended up.

Along the way, Beck and Woods reveal that Mills hasn’t crash-landed on just any terrestrial planet, but Earth itself. Mills is, therefore, forced throughout his and Koa’s journey to use his scientifically advanced weaponry to fight off a wide range of deadly prehistoric creatures. In what likely won’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who has seen anything even remotely similar to 65 , Mills and Koa’s journey also results in the two characters gradually forming an intensely trusting, if unconventional, bond.

Despite what its dramatic opening title reveal would like you to believe, 65 is nowhere near as original as it thinks. Driver’s casting as Mills makes the film’s twist on a typical uncharted planet premise easy to accept, and 65 doesn’t have any more truly subversive tricks hidden up its sleeves. The film spends the bulk of its runtime following Mills and Koa as they encounter a series of dangerous creatures and obstacles over the course of their journey together. The film’s straightforward, obstacle-driven structure results in it feeling a bit repetitive in its second and third acts, which only makes the thinness of 65 ’s story feel that much more apparent at times.

There is, however, something uncomplicatedly thrilling about watching 65 ’s heroes come face-to-face with increasingly difficult challenges and still overcome them with their own brute force and intellect. There are moments throughout 65 in which Beck and Woods demonstrate the same knack for action storytelling that they did in A Quiet Place . That’s particularly true of one sequence in which Driver’s Mills is forced to fix his dislocated shoulder before a pack of dangerous, raptor-like dinosaurs get the chance to rip him and Koa apart.

Woods and Beck’s economical approach to 65 ’s story also allows the pair to make the most out of Mills’ various futuristic weapons. The duo often avoids relying on exposition by simply letting viewers watch Mills put his gadgets to use, as he does during one sequence in which he places a series of glowing markers around his and Koa’s camping spot. The character’s decision to place the markers where he does makes their purpose clear long before their yellow, pulsing lights turn red and Mills begins looking around in fear for any approaching creatures.

Beck and Woods’ visual style isn’t nearly as refined as their storytelling. There are numerous moments throughout 65 when the duo’s uneven mix of general coverage shots and dim lighting makes it difficult to maintain a clear sense of the film’s physical spaces. One underground showdown between Mills and an unidentified dinosaur is particularly confusing to watch due to both the overwhelming darkness throughout it and its lack of establishing wide shots. Beck and Woods bring much more control to some of 65 ’s other action sequences, but the duo’s visual style nonetheless comes across as disappointingly rough and messy during certain sections of the film.

Fortunately for it, 65 is luckier than most other Hollywood blockbusters because it’s led by Driver, a performer who is willing to bring the same level of commitment to films like 65 as he does to the more grounded dramas he typically stars in. Driver’s performance as Mills is so unsentimental and to the point that it ensures that the character’s rare moments of emotional vulnerability land with real force. In a way, the cut-and-dry nature of Driver’s performance is ultimately a reflection of 65 itself, a film that understands how even the most pared-down version of a story can still be compelling and entertaining if told with enough passion and focus.

65 is now playing in theaters.

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Common sense media reviewers.

Violent, by-the-numbers sci-fi/dinosaur movie has gory bits.

65 Movie Poster: Adam Driver holds a weapon and looks alarm as a dinosaur lurks behind him

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Encourages selflessness: One character considers g

Both characters are strong and resourceful; they t

Four characters: Mills (Adam Driver), a White man,

Many are said to have died in cryosleep during cra

A few uses of "s--t." One use of "damn." A use of

Positive Messages

Encourages selflessness: One character considers giving up until he discovers that there's another person to think about.

Positive Role Models

Both characters are strong and resourceful; they take turns helping each other out of scrapes, working to overcome difficult odds.

Diverse Representations

Four characters: Mills (Adam Driver), a White man, is the central character. Young Koa is played by Ariana Greenblatt, who is of Puerto Rican heritage. Mills' wife (seen in prologue), played by Nika King, is Black. Their mixed-race daughter, Nevine, is played by Chloe Coleman, who is of African, Eastern European, and English descent. Mills' insistence on Koa learning English -- rather than trying to understand her language -- supports dominant power structures.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Many are said to have died in cryosleep during crash-landing. Dead bodies lie in a swamp. Girl in peril. Main character shoots laser-like space gun. Splattering dinosaur blood. Explosions. Main character pulls metal shard out of bloody wound. Character attacked by small dinosaur; he bashes it to death with gun butt. Main character falls out of tree; painfully snapping dislocated shoulder back into place. Dinosaur stabbed with pointed tusk. Quicksand. Dinosaur corpse covered in blood and maggots. Burned, gory dinosaur corpse. Red-tinted water sloshing on ship. Fiery crash-landing. Dinosaurs attack and eat one another. Asteroids colliding with ship. Main character briefly considers death by suicide.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

A few uses of "s--t." One use of "damn." A use of "oh God" while in pain.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that 65 is a sci-fi/dinosaur movie about a space traveler named Mills ( Adam Driver ) who crash-lands on primitive Earth and must battle dinosaurs to save his one surviving passenger, Koa ( Ariana Greenblatt ). Expect intense violence: Characters die (their bodies are shown), there's splattering dinosaur blood/gore, and Mills pulls a shard of metal out of his own bloody wound. Mills also shoots a space-laser gun at dinosaurs and bashes a small dinosaur to death with the butt of his gun. There are also explosions and falls from high places, and a character briefly considers death by suicide. A girl is sometimes in peril. Language includes a few uses of "s--t," plus "damn" and "oh God." To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Community Reviews

Parents say (6)
Kids say (10)

Based on 6 parent reviews

Dinosaurs look awesome

Decent popcorn flick but huge missed opportunity, what's the story.

In 65, astronaut Mills ( Adam Driver ), from the planet Somaris, agrees to a two-year trip through space, since the increased pay will help cover his daughter's medical expenses. Unfortunately, while he's in cryosleep, the ship is pelted with asteroids and forced to make a crash landing. Only Mills and young Koa ( Ariana Greenblatt ) survive. But somehow, they've ended up on Earth, 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs roamed. Now they must hike 15 kilometers across a deadly landscape to find the only remaining escape pod. And there's another problem: The asteroid that hit their ship was only a small one.

Is It Any Good?

While this sci-fi/dinosaur movie is competently made, it really only has one good idea, and it doesn't do much with it. The rest is generic and familiar and fails to generate much suspense or emotion. The first thing viewers must accept in 65 is that there's another planet that has inhabitants who speak English and act just like Earth humans. After the crash, we get all the usual CGI dinosaur attacks and jump scares -- all very similar to what we've seen before in the many Jurassic Park / World movies. The screenplay -- following a beat-by-beat, three-act formula -- sets up all the elements it's going to use during the final payoff, and it's all noticeable because there's not much else to think about. But perhaps the oddest touch in this movie is the decision to have Koa speak a different language (she's from a different "district" than Mills). This leads to many scenes of Mills trying to force Koa to learn English words -- which she gamely does -- rather than him trying to understand what she's saying. It's all a bit of a drag, like Land of the Lost with the fun taken out. Ultimately, 65 leaves us feeling dino-sore.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about 65 's violence . How did it make you feel? Was it exciting? Shocking? What did the movie show or not show to achieve this effect? Why is that important?

How does the movie handle the difference in the languages that the characters speak? How does the language barrier affect the story?

How does the movie deal with grief?

Movie Details

In theaters : March 10, 2023
On DVD or streaming : May 2, 2023
Cast : Adam Driver , Ariana Greenblatt , Chloe Coleman
Directors : Scott Beck , Bryan Woods
Inclusion Information : Female actors
Studios : Sony Pictures , Columbia Pictures
Genre : Action/Adventure
Topics : Dinosaurs
Run time : 93 minutes
MPAA rating : PG-13
MPAA explanation : intense sci-fi action and peril, and brief bloody images
Last updated : July 29, 2023

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65 - Everything You Need To Know

There's one thing everyone agrees on — dinosaurs are awesome . Who doesn't love a big, scaly, prehistoric beast? But for all the love these terrible lizards get, there aren't a whole lot of dinosaur movies. Sure, they've popped up here and there, showing up in Hollywood classics like "King Kong" and bizarre curios like "Tammy and the T-Rex." However, in recent years, the dinosaur market has been almost exclusively cornered by the "Jurassic Park" series, but a challenger to the dino throne emerged on March 10, 2023.

That's when "65" hit theaters, offering audiences a new take on these oversized reptiles. In a world of ever-growing IP, remakes, and reboots, this sci-fi flick offered a fresh take on an old concept, with some serious talent working both in front of the camera and behind the scenes. But if you've got questions about this Cretaceous caper, we've got answers. From what critics think about the flick to who wrote and directed this clash of man and monsters, read on for everything you need to know about "65."

What is the plot of 65?

With his daughter dying of an illness, Commander Mills decides to leave his home planet and take a two-year journey into space in the hopes of earning enough money to save his kid's life. Unfortunately, the ship he's piloting — which is full of cryo-sleeping passengers — accidentally hits an asteroid and crash-lands on a strange planet. In the wreckage, he manages to find one survivor, a young girl named Koa, and together, they're forced to survive in this alien world.

Of course, while it might be alien to Mills, it's not alien to us. As it turns out, this is Earth ... 65 million years ago. And yes, that means things get incredibly complicated for our heroes when hungry dinosaurs arrive on the scene. It also doesn't help that they've landed on Earth at a very, um, impactful point in history. With the clock ticking and the dinosaurs closing in, Mills and Koa have just one chance to escape, and they'll have to make a dangerous journey if they want to get off this rock alive.

Who stars in 65?

Co-starring alongside a bunch of toothy reptiles, we've got Adam Driver — a man who's no stranger to sci-fi. After playing in the acclaimed HBO series "Girls," Driver found worldwide stardom in the "Star Wars" sequel trilogy, portraying the tortured Kylo Ren, a man torn between the light and the dark side of the Force. In addition to wielding a lightsaber onscreen, Driver has also starred in projects like "Marriage Story," "The Last Duel," and "House of Gucci." In "65," he's playing the part of Commander Mills, who must protect a young girl in a world full of flesh-hungry reptiles.

So who portrays his young ward? Well, the part of Koa is played by Ariana Greenblatt, who's no stranger to surviving perilous situations. The young actress stole the show in "Love & Monsters" as Minnow, a young girl who can more than handle herself in a world full of massive mutant creatures. You'll also recognize Greenblatt as young Gamora from "Avengers: Infinity War," Daphne Diaz from "Stuck in the Middle," and the voice of Tabitha from the "Boss Baby" franchise.

Driver and Greenblatt are also joined by Chloe Coleman, who starred alongside Dave Bautista in the family flick "My Spy," Karen Gillan in the action thriller "Gunpowder Milkshake," and both Owen Wilson and Jennifer Lopez in "Marry Me." Rounding out the cast, "65" also features Nika King, who's most famous for playing Zendaya's mother, Leslie Bennett, in HBO's "Euphoria."

Who wrote and directed 65?

If you don't already know the names Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, you should probably memorize them real quick. It seems these two are becoming real-deal power players in Hollywood, especially when it comes to sci-fi and horror films. This dynamic duo is responsible for writing and directing "65," but before that, they were busy collaborating on films like 2019's "Haunt" (a slasher flick set in a haunted house) and 2015's "Nightlight" (a supernatural set-in-the-woods thriller). However, they really punched their ticket to success by writing one of the most dynamic genre scripts in recent memory: "A Quiet Place." They're also responsible for the adaptation of Stephen King's "The Boogeyman," so one thing is for sure about these two — they know how to bring some serious thrills.

Who produced 65?

Before turning their attention to Adam Driver's dino adventure, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods were hired to work on Quibi's (remember Quibi?) horror anthology series "50 States of Fright." However, they weren't alone on the project, and one of their fellow "50 States" collaborators joined "65" and gave the film some serious cred.

Alongside Deborah Liebling and Zainab Azizi, the legendary Sam Raimi served as a producer on "65." If you're at all familiar with horror movies or superhero flicks, then Raimi needs no introduction. He burst onto the scene with the "Evil Dead" franchise and helped lay out the blueprint for future Marvel flicks by helming the three Tobey Maguire "Spider-Man" movies. In addition to directing films like "Drag Me to Hell," "The Quick and the Dead," and "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness," Raimi has produced quite a few winners, including "Crawl," "Nightbooks," "Don't Breathe," and "30 Days of Night."

How did critics and audiences respond to 65?

The premise of "65" sounds awesome — humans crash-land on Earth and have to fight dinosaurs. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like critics were impressed by what "65" had to offer, with most of them wishing the film would just go extinct. The film currently has a terrible 37% critics' rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 78 reviews.

Our own Reuben Baron wasn't thrilled with the movie , writing, "'65' is dreadfully uncreative beyond the basic premise, utilizing cliched character types we've seen handled way more compellingly nearly everywhere else." David Fear of Rolling Stone agreed that "65" was majorly lacking, saying, "It's not schlocky enough to be so-bad-it's-good and nowhere near good enough to be taken even a tiny bit seriously."

Audiences, on the other hand, are a little more fond of the dinosaurian adventure. At the time of this writing, the film has a 63% approval rating based on 500+ reviews. Perhaps their feelings are best summed up by critic Maria Lattila of WhyNow, who wrote, "Is '65' good? Debatable. Is '65' enjoyable? Absolutely. The middle-budget film has disappeared, but '65' is an ambitious, entertaining example of why it should be returned."

How did 65 perform at the box office?

While average moviegoers on Rotten Tomatoes seem to like "65," its audience approval score of 63% doesn't line up with the box office numbers. On its opening weekend, the dinosaur sci-fi film earned just $12.3 million at the domestic box office. If we add in the international profits, that brings us to a total of $20 million — not great when your reported production budget is $44.5 million.

So why the massive flop? It could be partly thanks to the negative critical reviews. The film was also fighting some serious competition. It opened against "Scream 6," which took the #1 spot at the box office. Plus, there was leftover competition from the weekend before with "Creed III," which punched its way to the #2 spot, leaving "65" in third. In other words, it was a dino-sorry opening weekend.

What is 65 rated?

As is par for the course with most sci-fi blockbusters, "65" is rated PG-13. If you're worried about little ones, there's no sex or nudity, and the language here is about what you'd expect from a more serious Marvel movie. "65" earns its PG-13 largely thanks to the dinosaurs, which are pretty scary and very hungry. There's quite a bit of blood (but not excessive), plenty of attacks by those terrible lizards, and more than a few wounds earned in battle. Our hero has to get pretty violent to fight off these creatures, but honestly, nothing ever strays into R-rated territory.

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’65’ Review: An Extraterrestrial Adam Driver Lands on Earth
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'65' Review: What on Earth?
Watch on. I don't mean the movie; that would be unkind. "65," directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (two writers of the first "Quiet Place" film), is not interesting enough to be truly ...
65 movie review & film summary (2023)
You'd think a movie in which Adam Driver fights a bunch of dinosaurs couldn't possibly be boring, but that's exactly what "65" is.. This is a movie that would have benefitted from being a whole lot stupider. The big-budget sci-fi flick—which reportedly cost $91 million to make and was featured in a Super Bowl ad—should have embraced its inherent B-movie roots.
Movie Reviews
NYT Critic's Pick. R. Action, Thriller. Directed by Alex Garland. In Alex Garland's tough new movie, a group of journalists led by Kirsten Dunst, as a photographer, travels a United States at ...
'Repulsion' -- the 'Psycho' of '65; Movie on ...
NEW YORK, Oct. 3 -- An absolute knockout of a movie in the psychological horror line has been accomplished by Roman Polanski in his first English-language film. It is the British-made, French ...
65
Alex Parra Fun and thrilling, Adam Driver helps elevate the weak script. Soild Action B movie! Rated 3.5/5 Stars • Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 07/26/23 Full Review Ricky Dumb as a rock but somewhat ...
65 review
Unusually, for an elevator pitch genre film such as this, it starts off in far shakier territory than where it ends up. Driver's pilot, Mills, is saying goodbye to his wife and sick daughter ...
65 (2023)
65: Directed by Scott Beck, Bryan Woods. With Adam Driver, Ariana Greenblatt, Chloe Coleman, Nika King. An astronaut crash lands on a mysterious planet only to discover he's not alone.
65
After a catastrophic crash on an unknown planet, pilot Mills (Adam Driver) quickly discovers he's actually stranded on Earth…65 million years ago. Now, with only one chance at rescue, Mills and the only other survivor, Koa (Ariana Greenblatt), must make their way across an unknown terrain riddled with dangerous prehistoric creatures in an epic fight to survive.
65
Full Review | Original Score: C | Aug 9, 2023. Manuel São Bento InSession Film. 65 is as unimaginative and predictable as anticipated, only even less entertaining and far more bland. Adam Driver ...
65 Review
65 Review Adam Driver shoots a bunch of dinosaurs like any good father would. ... Mills and Koa's backstories are completely unexplored because 65 is dedicated to being a movie about fleeing ...
'65' review: Not hall-of-fame bad, just dumb and dull
Review: There are '65' million reasons to avoid the new Adam Driver dinosaur space flick. Adam Driver in the movie "65.". If you asked the AI program ChatGPT to write a dinosaur/space ...
'65' Review: Adam Driver vs. Dinosaurs in Underwhelming Sci-Fi
Release date: Friday, March 10. Cast: Adam Driver, Ariana Greenblatt, Chloe Coleman, Nika King. Directors-screenwriters: Scott Beck, Bryan Woods. Rated PG-13, 1 hour 33 minutes. In any case, said ...
65 [Reviews]
Summary. Adam Driver plays an astronaut who crash lands on a mysterious planet only to discover he's not alone. Distributors. Columbia Pictures , Sony Pictures Entertainment. Initial Release. Mar ...
'65' Review: A Decent But Formulaic Sci-Fi Action Thriller That
A satisfying stew of genre tropes and classic sci-fi and monster movie influences, "65" is a popcorn movie that isn't quite the intense thrill ride it gives the impression it wants to be, although it definitely has its moments. READ MORE: '65' Trailer: Adam Driver Transforms Into An Action Hero Fighting Dinosaurs In Sci-Fi Thriller From Sam Raimi
Movie review: '65' spotlights epic sci-fi survival
The impending meteor adds a ticking clock for Mills and Koa, as well as for the entire species of dinosaurs, but the dinosaurs' fate has already been spoiled. The visual effects look good. 65 is ...
'Oppenheimer' Review: A Man for Our Time
Christopher Nolan's complex, vivid portrait of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the "father of the atomic bomb," is a brilliant achievement in formal and conceptual terms. The writer and director ...
65 review: a simple, bare-bones sci-fi thriller
A lean 93-minute runtime. Several intense, clever action sequences. Cons. A messy, unpolished visual style. An overly familiar story. The new movie 65 is a refreshingly unambitious sci-fi ...
65 (film)
65 is a 2023 American science fiction film written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, and starring Adam Driver.Driver plays an astronaut who crashes on an unknown planet with a challenging environment and attempts to help a young girl, played by Ariana Greenblatt, survive.Beck and Woods produced with Sam Raimi, Deborah Liebling, and Zainab Azizi.
65 Movie Review
Parents need to know that 65 is a sci-fi/dinosaur movie about a space traveler named Mills (Adam Driver) who crash-lands on primitive Earth and must battle dinosaurs to save his one surviving passenger, Koa (Ariana Greenblatt).Expect intense violence: Characters die (their bodies are shown), there's splattering dinosaur blood/gore, and Mills pulls a shard of metal out of his own bloody wound.
65
Unfortunately, the ship he's piloting — which is full of cryo-sleeping passengers — accidentally hits an asteroid and crash-lands on a strange planet. In the wreckage, he manages to find one ...
65 Movie Review: An underwhelming survival saga that tries hard to be
Ronak Kotecha, Mar 10, 2023, 10.00 AM IST Critic's Rating: 2.5/5. Story: Dating back 65 million years, '65' is a science fiction about a pilot and a little girl, who find themselves stranded ...
Official Discussion
An astronaut crash lands on a mysterious planet only to discover he's not alone. Director: Scott Beck, Bryan Woods. Writers: Scott Beck, Bryan Woods. Cast: Adam Driver as Mills. Ariana Greenblatt as Koa. Chloe Coleman as Nevine.

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