Adam Driver fights dinosaurs in an (almost) one-man show

You haven’t seen a shorter fantasy film in a while

Despite his irregular features, which do not allow him to step into the role of a Hollywood handsome man, Adam Driver is one of the most talented modern actors. Cast in the films of Jim Jarmusch, Scorsese, Soderbergh, Spike Lee, Terry Gilliam, and Ridley Scott, he cemented that reputation, earning two Oscar nominations for Best Actor (Lead in Marriage Story and Supporting in Black in the Clan ). However, the general public knows him mostly as the “grandfather” Kylo Ren in the last trilogy of the Star Wars saga.

Six years after its end, the actor returns to the fantasy genre. In “65”, Adam Driver, armed with a big gun, survives in an unknown world filled with prehistoric monsters. Directed (and written) by the screenwriters of the horror sensation “Not a Sound” Scott Beck and Brian Woods, produced by Sam Raimi – who forged his reputation in the horror genre himself before turning to commercial projects like “Spider-Man”. Driver stars as an astronaut whose ship crashes on a strange planet. But this is not a previously unseen part of the universe, but… Earth, only 65 million years ago, shortly before the fatal meteorite hit.

“65” is an unusual fantasy film: almost a one-man show by Adam Driver, in which only three other actresses (two of them children) participate – and only briefly. Part of the explanation for this is the fact that it was filmed during the pandemic. It lasts 93 minutes, which in the times of excessively long forms can be admired. The trouble is that there is no plot and no character development even for that much. It looks and sounds like a B-movie but with dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs are the great mystery of modern cinema. We know that they have captivated the collective imagination, especially the children’s, since time immemorial. But aside from Spielberg in Jurassic Park (1993) and the lucrative franchise that followed with variable production quality, no one has managed to harness prehistoric reptiles to cinema the way they – and audiences – deserve. Not that they haven’t tried. Computers and the visual worlds they create are getting better and better, but dinosaurs remain criminally underexposed.

In “65”, whose budget is 45 million dollars (or an impressive 500,000 per minute), the dinosaurs are decently scary. In dramaturgical terms, their appearance is calculated in a completely predictable way: first come the small, herbivores and those who can be overcome by hand-to-hand combat or a shot, in the decisive phase of the carpet the tyrannosaurs come out.

Driver alternates dramatic scowls with action fights, and his partner in the second half of the film is the little Ariana Greenblatt – as Koa, the sole survivor of the rocket’s cryo chambers, with whom they do not even speak the same language. Since Adam’s character is a troubled father, on the unknown planet he accepts the baby girl as his second daughter to protect.

It’s amazing how Beck and Woods managed not to inject an inch of depth and mystery into their tale of dizzying time and space travel. All they care about is the simple battle for survival against hostile nature (there’s not even an environmental message) in which you get from point A to point B alive. There are even video games with more complex plots.

A genre exercise without much imagination, without any directorial creativity or stepping aside from clichés, “65” isn’t even bad enough to be funny. The cinematography, the locations, the actors, the dinosaurs, the special effects – everything in it is at a solid professional level. Not the script. It’s a shame, because 90-minute movies with an original concept that aren’t sequels, part of a franchise, or a comic book adaptation are so rare in studio Hollywood.

After all, there’s Adam Driver and T-rex. Both are doing everything in their power to save this movie (barely).