Stream It Or Skip It: ‘65’ on Netflix, a Bare-Bones B-Movie in Which Adam Driver Dodges Dinosaurs

Adam Driver headlines 65 (now on Netflix, in addition to streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video), a keep-it-simple-stupid B-movie in which he plays a marooned space traveler who has to fight dinosaurs in order to survive and also keep them from eating the little girl under his protection. Sam Raimi is a credited producer, and A Quiet Place writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods direct, so here’s hoping we can squeeze a little fun out of this genre exercise, and it won’t be a dino-bore that just leaves us dino-sore.   

65: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Subtitle: PRIOR TO THE ADVENT OF MANKIND (pause) IN THE INFINITY OF SPACE (pause)… it goes on like this for a bit, all overdramatic and silly, about how there were ancient civilizations elsewhere in the cosmos, capable of interstellar travel and such. Then we meet Mills (Driver) as he and his wife (Nika King) watch their daughter (Chloe Coleman) play on the beach on their home planet of Not Earth. The girl’s sick. He’s gotta take a two-year space-excursion gig in order to pay for her treatments, proving that even long long ago in a galaxy far far away, health insurance functioned exactly the way it does now, namely, not worth diddley-dick. Mills and his daughter share a moment, and then he’s off.

WHUMP. CLUNK. Those are asteroids hitting the spacecraft. Mills is the guy piloting the ship while the rest of the passengers are in cryostasis. He runs to the control room and grabs the stick as massive chunks of rock smash and bang off the hull, merciless in their destruction. Sleeping people hurtle into the void. “Emergency landing!” says the female robot computer voice, as if we can’t tell from the moving pictures we’re watching that Mills, by taking a hard turn towards a nearby planet, is doing exactly that. It’s a rough one. He’s gotta pull a chunk of shrapnel out of his side and navigate the slimy mudhole he landed in and figure out where the other piece of the ship is and is that a growling creature in the water over there, its spiny back briefly emerging from the muck? Yep. 

Thankfully, he’s got a rifle. He considers pointing it at himself, until he realizes one other person survived the crash, a young girl named Koa (Ariana Greenblatt), but if you want to call her Newt, that’s fine. He puts her over his shoulder and slogs through the mud and spots a giant reptilian footprint. What planet is this? I’ll give you three guesses, although you’ll only need one. Koa awakens, but she speaks a different language so they can’t understand each other, which is great, because if anything gets in the way of a good B-movie sci-fi survival yarn like this, it’s dialogue. Mills uses his little computer gadget to determine that the piece of the ship with a functioning escape vessel is a goodly hike through the jungle and up a mountain, so off they go. Easier said than done, of course, because between the massive bugs and nasty parasites and hungry toothy dinosaurs, life is really finding its f—ing way on this planet.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: 65 is Jurassic Park meets Aliens with the stripped-down-premise-meets-big-star formula of Idris Elba Fights A Lion With His Damn Bare Hands movie Beast. 

Performance Worth Watching: Like Elba, Driver seems incapable of going through the motions, even in a trivial exercise like this, finding a moment or three of substance for a character who’s otherwise a hasty sketch of a human being. 

Memorable Dialogue: In one of those moments of substance, Driver delivers an earnest line-reading when Mills explains to his daughter why he’s leaving for so long: “It’s not because of you. It’s for you.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: What these Quiet Place guys forgot to add to 65 is an equivalent to the unforgettably intense Emily Blunt Gives Birth In A Bathtub While Being Stalked By Monsters Who Can’t See Her But Can Hear Her scene. It’s the kind of thing that gives a well-trod premise the vitality it needs to be more than just a movie about a dude trying not to get eaten to death. That doesn’t mean 65 is unwatchable though; it’s Just Fine in a way that renders it an acceptable 93 minutes of escapism without making you upset that you wasted your time watching it.

Faint praise, I know, but let’s not damn the movie outright. Beck and Woods stir up a few moments of comedy amidst the grim scenario – Mills gotta distract the girl from the potentially dire prospects of this situation – and layer in some amusingly preposterous coincidence to amplify the stakes. Visually, the film ranges from nifty CGI-action dynamics (smallish dinos attacking from all angles, a scary silhouette of a considerably less-small one) to repetitive (lots of set pieces with our protags clambering over plastic rocks), and doesn’t look too cheap.

But, like, what’s the movie about about? The relationship between Mills and Koa, who reminds him of his daughter, the thought of whom makes him despondent? The classic man-vs.-nature struggle? The idea of holding onto hope in spite of difficult odds? Meh. Nothing really sinks its teeth in deep enough to draw blood, metaphorically speaking, of course. What we do get is plenty of dino spectacle, Driver’s attempt to not brood too hard and the nagging underlying assertion that nobody’d be in this mess if Outer Space Blue Cross would’ve made the Mills family’s deductible more affordable. I couldn’t take another movie in which children suffer while their parents argue about billing codes and out-of-network providers with customer service representatives. I’d take the velociraptors over that any day.

Our Call: 65 isn’t going to leave an indelible impression on anyone, but for an it-is-what-it-is movie, you could do a hell of a lot worse. STREAM IT, but maybe wait til it’s out of the paid-rental tier and hits a streaming service. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.