65 (2023)
I caught 65 on Netflix, and reasonably enjoyed the ride. It's very much a "one damned thing after another" plot, with Adam Driver leading as Mills, the space trucker who's forced to crash-land on Earth right before the end of the Cretaceous thanks to the asteroid impact. He and Koa (Ariana Greenblatt, who speaks a made-up language throughout, strangely enough), try to survive to escape, while nasty dinosaurs hunt them at every turn.
Things I liked about the movie: the use of technology is very well-handled in this one. Mills relies heavily on his futuristic tech to get him out of jams, and the tech is almost another character in the movie. Well done aspect of it, even if there's plenty of deus ex machina to go around.
I didn't particularly like that Mills and Koa have a language barrier--felt like lazy screenwriting to me, so we didn't get dialogue interchanges, so much as name-calling ("Koa? Koa?") and guttural misunderstandings between the two.
My biggest beef with the movie involved the dinosauroids--I call them that because overwhelmingly, the dinos were made-up dinosaurs, versus actual species. They were cartoonish, video game renderings of dinosaurs (well-rendered CGI, to be sure), but with the budget this movie had, it felt (again) lazy to not use some of that budget to apply some prehistorical accuracy to the dinosaurs. Anybody who loves cinematic dinosaurs will be like "WTF was THAT dinosaur supposed to be?" If you're setting a dinosaur survival story as your focus, at least get the dinosaurs right, versus using made-up ones. It was an odd oversight. Even the T. rex representations look like weirdly mutated versions of them.
Driver and Greenblatt do well with what is required of them, but this one wasn't a major accomplishment in moviemaking, so much as a mild entertainment. I do give props to the use of the tech. Not since HER (2013) have I seen a more thoughtful application of SF consumer tech rendered as seamlessly as in 65. I just wish they'd made the dinosaurs actual species, versus pretend bugaboos.
**
Things I liked about the movie: the use of technology is very well-handled in this one. Mills relies heavily on his futuristic tech to get him out of jams, and the tech is almost another character in the movie. Well done aspect of it, even if there's plenty of deus ex machina to go around.
I didn't particularly like that Mills and Koa have a language barrier--felt like lazy screenwriting to me, so we didn't get dialogue interchanges, so much as name-calling ("Koa? Koa?") and guttural misunderstandings between the two.
My biggest beef with the movie involved the dinosauroids--I call them that because overwhelmingly, the dinos were made-up dinosaurs, versus actual species. They were cartoonish, video game renderings of dinosaurs (well-rendered CGI, to be sure), but with the budget this movie had, it felt (again) lazy to not use some of that budget to apply some prehistorical accuracy to the dinosaurs. Anybody who loves cinematic dinosaurs will be like "WTF was THAT dinosaur supposed to be?" If you're setting a dinosaur survival story as your focus, at least get the dinosaurs right, versus using made-up ones. It was an odd oversight. Even the T. rex representations look like weirdly mutated versions of them.
Driver and Greenblatt do well with what is required of them, but this one wasn't a major accomplishment in moviemaking, so much as a mild entertainment. I do give props to the use of the tech. Not since HER (2013) have I seen a more thoughtful application of SF consumer tech rendered as seamlessly as in 65. I just wish they'd made the dinosaurs actual species, versus pretend bugaboos.
**
No comments have been added yet.
