65 (2023)

Adam Driver, an actor of evident seriousness, spends much of 65 trudging through prehistoric Louisiana, standing in for prehistoric Earth, with a laser rifle and a wounded expression. The premise, an ancient astronaut crashing into the Cretaceous with only a young girl for company, is the kind of high-concept pitch that sounds better in the lobby than it plays on the screen. The film seems to know this. It keeps the dialogue minimal, the running time brisk, and the dinosaurs plentiful. There is a grim professionalism to the whole enterprise, a sense that everyone involved understood they were making a B-movie and resolved to make it competently.

The social consciousness on display is modest and mostly incidental. The young Koa is granted real agency: she kills a predator, drags her guardian out of quicksand, and finishes the final beast with a dinosaur tooth. That is more than most father-daughter survival pictures bother to offer. The casting places a Black performer in a small supporting role, though the film makes no comment on it, and Mills's motivation, earning money to treat a sick child, gestures faintly at the cost of care without pursuing the thought anywhere. The remaining markers of cultural awareness are simply absent. No romantic subplot, no identity politics, no sermon.

What remains is a lean creature feature that mistakes volume for tension and mud for atmosphere. The visual effects are serviceable, the score is loud, and the ending arrives with the asteroid promised in the title card. It is not offensive. It is not anything, really, which may be its own quiet achievement. A film about the extinction of the dinosaurs that inspires no strong feeling in any direction has reached a kind of neutrality rare in modern studio product. We file it accordingly.