Spacemen vs. Dinosaurs

There is something gleefully fun about dinosaurs. Kids, of course, recognize this, playing with little plastic dinosaurs from as early as they can pick stuff up. The terrible thunder lizards are like sci-fi, except they actually existed, meaning actual history was just as cool as anything we could imagine, even if we can't see the actual reality of these beings in anything other than fossils and drawings. Well, and movies. Lots of movies showing off just how cool these beasts really could be.

Of course, we have had a long running and very popular (if not always creatively fulfilling) series of films that have capitalized on that exact, "Ooh, look! Dinosaurs!" vibe: Jurassic ParkWhile ever kid has dreams of seeing dinosaurs, Michael Crichton gave that dream a reality, at least on paper. His two Jurassic Park books spawned a movie franchise that's gone five movies strong (with no signs of slowing down), all because people love seeing dinosaurs made flesh.. Across two books (and a young adult novel), six films (and two shorts), and a TV series, fans of dinosaurs have had plenty of chances to see these terrible lizards brought to life in cool and scary ways. Naturally, Universal Studios (creators of the films) shouldn't have the lock on dinosaurs and how they're depicted on screen. Other groups should be able to take up the dinos and smash their toys together. Dinosaurs are cool, so let's have more of them on screen!

That, at least, is the premise of 65, a sci-fi spectacle that asks the important questions: "what if spacemen and dinosaurs had to fight?" It's a film with an absolutely bonkers setup that does, indeed, put sci-fi space travelers against the classic dinosaurs, on the dinos' own home turf, for a race against time. And yet, despite such a simple to enjoy premise, the film tanked at the Box Office, taking in only $60.7 Mil against $45 Mil budget (a big loss in Hollywood math). What went wrong? Why did audiences fail to turn up for such a clearly obvious idea?

Well, the start, the film isn't exactly easy to understand. For all it's "lets smash space travelers up against dinosaurs", it had a very strange way to get to that idea. Our travelers, the pilot Mills (Adam Driver) and his only surviving charge from a doomed journey, Koa (Ariana Greenblatt), aren't human. They're travelers from another civilization that lived millions of years before our own, and they just so happen to get stuck on Earth, forced to make a long trek across land to reach the other half of their ship to find a rescue pod and make their way back off the rock. That alone requires a fair bit of explanation and setup, all while a simple, "oops, we traveled back in time" setup wouldn't require nearly the explanation and hand waving. It's always a bad sign when a film has to open with a text scroll to explain its story, and this one does.

Another big hurdle for the film is that it only has two characters, Mills and Koa, and they can't communicate with each other. Mills speaks English (which, let's just ignore how silly that is and assume it's some "galactic common" language and move on) while Koa speaks something else entirely. That means that while they can motion at each other, and try to learn a few words here and there, most of the film is devoid of real dialogue because the characters can't speak a common tongue.

I get what writers / directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods were going for here, mind you. The two wrote the original A Quiet Place, a film predicated on a simple premise: what if people couldn't make noise because noise would kill them? Here we have a similar idea: what if, due to circumstances beyond your control, you couldn't communicate with the only other person left. That's an interesting idea on its own, but that's not the premise of the movie, just a complication. It's mixed with "what if spacemen had to deal with dinosaurs" and also, "oh, and a meteor is plunging it's way to the planet so you have to hustle to escape." The film has a lot going on in it, and most of it doesn't really amount to nearly as much as it should.

In fairness, Driver and Greenblatt are able to convey a lot with just their body language and a few simple words between them. They are able to create a bond between their characters that works even as they are forced to stick to simple words and basic tone of voice. I enjoyed their characters and thought the two actors did a good job with the roles they were given. I do think, however, that simply letting these two actually talk to each other and share stories would have been a far better and more effective way to let them bond. It also would have been a much better way to tell the story.

Meanwhile, another big issue with the film is that the setup purposefully leaves us with only two characters. While this is a good way to evoke the feeling of being stranded and all alone, which was clearly a goal here, it also means we can't really enjoy the dinosaur carnage the way we want. Think about it: even if both characters don't survive to the end credits (and I won't spoil that since the film only came out this year) they will have a certain amount of plot armor guiding them to nearly the end. The story requires them to bond and grow together as they make their escape, and if one of them dies at any point early on, we're left with just on schmuck to get to the end. If they then die, that's it. No more movie. Roll credits.

Say what you will about the Jurassic Park films (and I have, at great length), but those movies at least knew they had to pack in a few characters so that we could have both heroes and fodder. The joy of dinosaurs is watching the carnivores come up and absolutely destroy the humans because, for all our superiority, we're fragile little meat sacks in comparison. If you're going to give us spacemen versus dinosaurs you have to give us enough spacemen where the dinosaurs can actually do some damage. If it had been a some squad of soldiers protecting Koa and, one by one, they had been picked off, we would not only have gotten more characters and character development (because some of these guys would be able to speak to each other) but we'd also have bodies so the dinosaurs could feast and enjoy themselves. That bit of carnage is missing here.

The film is handsome, with lovely outdoor spaces and plenty of solid dinosaur CGI. This is a film that, stylistically, can stand up against the Jurassic Park films in a favorable way. It certainly gives us all the cool looking dinos we want, and plenty of opportunities for Mills to go around, shooting them. It doesn't really have the ability to give us the dinosaur thrill ride, though, because we never really expect anyone to die. Mills and Koa have to get through most of the movie together because, otherwise, there really is not point to the movie at all.

I respect what the filmmakers wanted to do. They had a high concept sci-fi epic that spoke to the lizard brains in all of us. Spacemen versus dinosaurs sounds awesome, and I love that they went for it and made that goofy idea into a movie. The biggest problem is that, with that setup in hand, the filmmakers make something too cerebral, too staid, too controlled. It suits their storytelling rhythms but not the actual needs of a movie like this. It lacks the fun, the goofiness, the chutzpah to say, "let's smash these things together and create the biggest tangle of action figures we can." Without that, 65 just lists by until its unearned climax occurs.

I wanted to like 65. I wanted to be able to say, "this was a diamond in the rough that shouldn't have been ignored." It's a fine, handsomely made movie that just couldn't bring the pop needed. It's fine, but not great, and it certainly isn't as dopey and delicious as it needed to be. I sat through it and didn't hate my time, but I struggle to think that anyone not actively looking to review it needs to bother doing the same.