3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): 65

2023, Scott Beck / Bryan Woods (Haunt) -- download

There is a scifi actioner sub-sub-sub-genre that I am always down for --- a spaceship carrying passengers, sometimes people in stasis, sometimes prisoners, crashes on a remote planet and the pilot, along with whomever survives, have to ... survive. My elevator pitch for the next one is has a Predator doing the crashing but into an Earth-bound warzone. This one has pilot Mills' (Adam Driver, House of Gucci) passenger transport ship hit by a rogue meteor, dropping his ship onto Earth, killing all his passengers but one. The gimmick? The title -- its Earth's prehistoric time period, and guess what that "rogue meteor" was part of? 

This movie attempted, and somewhat succeeded, to do more than just the Get From A to B and survive. There is world building (theirs, not ours 65 mil ago), providing Mills a backstory of taking another long haul job to pay for his daughter's medical treatments. It gives weight when the only survivor of the crash is a young girl named Koa (Ariana Greenblatt, Awake), from a planet/people with a language he doesn't speak, and most of his tech is broken, so he cannot properly communicate with her. So, the dialogue and exposition conduit is Mills, a man who would have killed himself upon crawling out of the wreckage, but has a tortured need to save... someone. You see, and you probably guessed the SPOILER as soon as I did, but his daughter died while he was away. And he cannot let another young girl die.

Of course, there are lots of dinosaurs to contend with as he traverses a landscape more akin to northern BC than our familiar dino laden jungles of other movies. There are the requisite familiar ones, from the Jurassic movies, like the T-Rex and raptors, none of which the movie cares are in the same era, but also these nasty, brutish things that are probably not any real species. Just five minutes of Googling shows that pretty much every dinosaur enthusiast on the Internet is screaming about this movie being inaccurate. 

But does it really matter? No. Monsters chase and try to eat people! That is wall this movie wants, and the use of the 65 Millions Years Ago gimmick is only considered sparingly, and for the purposes of creating draw. Its an elevator pitch applied to a template, and I would say the movie succeeds more in the spaces between the pitch, the performances and the relationship between the two humans. I said earlier that the movie only somewhat succeeds, and since I am attaching the performances to that tentative success, I guess I have to say Driver is primarily responsible. I am not widely familiar with his non-mainstream work, and he was very very cardboard as Kylo Ren in Star Wars (do I have to say that? yes, yes I do, as I know a LOT of people who have never seen these movies), but he does raise this character a smidge above what ... say Mark Wahlberg would have done with the character. I do wish the movie was just a bit more refined, so we could end up at the level of Pitch Black but I was satisfied with what I got.