65

This movie is so bad it made me like the train wreck that was Jurassic Park Dominion. And that movie sucked.

Set 65 million years in the past, 65 follows Mills (Adam Driver), a space pilot from the distant planet Somaris as he heads out on a two-year expedition into the unknown to hopefully earn enough money to help treat his daughter’s potentially terminal illness. But after a mishap sees him crash land on a prehistoric Earth full of dinosaurs, dangerous terrain, and more than a few other deathtraps looking to end Mills’ life, Mills comes across a survivor from his downed ship, Koa (Arian Greenblatt), a young girl from another part of Somaris that he now needs to protect from the oversized lizards creeping around every corner. Needing to find a way off-planet before they’re eaten alive, Mills and Koa make their way through a world neither are well-equipped to survive, let alone understand, their only hope of returning home resting on the pair putting their homeworld differences aside, working together, and with a little bit of luck, having enough ammunition to defend themselves from the dinosaur hordes.

Cool premise, right? Too bad this movie has about twenty minutes total of interesting dinosaur shenanigans going on, with the rest of the runtime missing the mark so badly that I have no clue why this movie needed to blue ball audiences with the idea of it being about dinosaurs in the first place. From its genuinely interesting premise face-planting almost immediately out of the gate to a survival story that isn’t effective in the slightest to a central pair of protagonists that are simply annoying to watch, I was not only disappointed by the time the credits rolled but almost offended that it was put into theaters, to begin with as it stinks of shitty quality streaming service fodder that disappears a week after its release.

I’m not joking when I say I legitimately tried to take a nap during this movie. In all honesty, I was hoping I’d awakened by some awesome dino-action that would help get me reinvested in what was happening onscreen, but unfortunately, any dinosaur-related scenes were few and far between, with only a couple of them capitalizing on the initial premise that got meant the theater, to begin with. But if I have to give this movie any credit outside of the scant few dinosaur fights, there’s one aspect of this script that made me laugh out loud in an “I can’t believe they did this” kind of way — a twist I won’t spoil here as it might be the only reason to stick around until the end of this one.

This film not only squanders an excellent hook for a non-Jurassic Park-related dinosaur movie, but it makes Adam Driver look bad on top of it, something that, in general, should be pretty damn hard to do. Not even getting a campy B-movie out of this one is frustrating, made doubly annoying thanks to an emotional throughline that’s so cliche, so badly scripted, and so overly cheesy that I lost count of how many times I rolled my eyes. 65 isn’t a good film even with dinosaurs running around in it, so do yourself a favor and go rewatch literally any other Jurassic Park film instead of this one — even one of the bad ones.