Saturday was a grimly cold, blustery, snowy, last gasp of Winter kind of a day, so Mrs. solost suggested seeing a matinee. She wanted to see ‘65’ so off we went with sonlost the younger.
I mean, it wasn’t a terrible movie; it was an okayish soft sci-fi actioner. Basic plot: very human-like alien space travelers 65 million years ago (a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away?) are being transported to somewhere else in cryostasis when the auto-piloted ship runs into an asteroid belt. The ship’s AI wakes up Captain Adam Driver, who attempts to pilot through the space rocks, but has to crash-land on a primitive uncharted planet we will later know as Earth, but 65 million years ago may as well have been called “Planet of Monsters”. All the cryostasis passengers have been killed except for one young girl, who doesn’t speak his language but will become an emotional stand-in for his dead daughter, who was killed by an exposition stick that is repeatedly beaten over the audience’s collective head. Driver and pseudo-daughter then have to hike several kilometers to the other half of their damaged spaceraft to access an escape pod, battling dinosaurs all the while. Oh, and the asteroid belt they crashed into? It contains the Big Asteroid that will hit Earth in the next couple days, presumably the one that kills off the dinos, so clock’s a-tickin’.
So what was wrong with the movie? Well, this AVClub review spells it out pretty well: the emotional beats are glaringly obvious-- since there’s only Driver and the girl, there’s no real emotional weight to the danger, since we know it’s extremely unlikely that either character will be killed. The movie should have kept a few live unfrozen passengers around at first, to serve as dino food. The arc is pretty clear: Driver resents having the burden of the girl at first, but they eventually develop a strong bond through shared adversity.
Watching the trailer, I had assumed that future humans travel back in time, but no, and it’s no spoiler, the movie makes very clear at the very start that Adam Driver and girl are ‘ancient aliens’ who crash-land on Earth by accident. Fairly minor quibble, but I’ve always had a hard time buying extremely human-like aliens, like Star Trek aliens who are basically human but have pointy ears or bumps on the bridge of their nose. Or, of course, the Star Wars humanoids. So the random planet they accidentally land on just coincidentally evolves beings who will look exactly like them? OK.
And I’m no expert Paleontologist, but the dinos were weird and wrong. There were 3 basic types of ‘bad guy’ dinos-- large packs of small dog-sized dinos which were very vicious but could be individually killed fairly easily. Those were maybe velociraptors, and I didn’t have a problem with them. But then there were packs of larger dinos, maybe the size of jungle cats, that had relatively small heads for their body size, and walked on all fours, but they crept on their front legs very low to the ground while their hindquaters were raised up. Sinister-looking, but weird, and no dino depiction I’ve ever seen.
Then of course the big baddie eventually shows up-- the king of dinos, the Terrible Tyrannosaurus Rex. But waitaminite-- the head looks T Rex-like, but it has long, well developed front legs, and walks on all fours as often as it rears up on its hind legs. What the frick? Everybody over the age of 5 knows T Rex, as awesome as it was, had silly-looking baby arms in relation to its size. Did Steven Spielberg trademark all the cool dinos? More likely, the dino designer decided to ‘improve’ on T Rex.
