65: Adam Driver’s muscular and taut dinosaurs action thriller

Adam Driver’s new movie is a taut and muscular action thriller with a very honest twist it doesn’t try to hide.

65 is in cinemas now. Picture: Sony

Is 65 much more than dinosaurs and laser guns? Yes and no.

The Adam Driver movie is a propulsive sci-fi flick with a simple throughline, decent action and enough emotional resonance to invest in. Or maybe the investment is just Driver himself, who is always so very watchable whether he’s light-sabring or writing poetry.

65 feels like the kind of movie Charlton Heston would’ve made, a muscular and taut actioner that avoids being too macho. And the “it was Earth all along” moment comes early in the piece.

Allow us to elaborate. Driver plays Mills, a space pilot whose ship crashes into an unexpected asteroid field. He was the only person conscious as everyone else was in hibernation pods.

The collision is catastrophic, and he crash lands on an uncharted planet. That planet is Earth and the time in 65 million years in our past. Not his past, just ours. It’s his present. There was some confusion after the trailer came out but let’s get it out of the way that this isn’t a time-travelling thing.

Adam Driver plays a role Charlton Heston might have back in the day. Picture: Sony

If you remember your school lessons, 65 million years ago is when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, and about the time that world-destroying asteroid made a beeline for our little pale blue dot.

So, there’s more than one obstacle for Mills to conquer – the sharp teethed creatures who want to attack and eat him, and the impending extinction level event.

There is one other survivor in the crash, Koa (Ariana Greenblatt), a young girl similar in age to his late daughter. It’s an obvious but effective emotional hook and Mills is determined to save Koa when he couldn’t his child.

There’s only one shot off the planet, an escape pod 15 clicks away, perched atop a mountain. Between them and it are all manner of voracious dinosaurs, and other natural threats including geysers.

In most ways, there’s not that much to 65. It really is just Driver and Greenblatt, running from dinosaurs, hitting them with laser guns and little bombs in their quest for survival while the threat of a giant asteroid counts down the clock.

Adam Driver and Ariana Greenblatt. Picture: Sony

The dinos aren’t as fearsome as we’ve seen before, and not enough encounters have enough weight to them.

There’s no subtlety to 65. What you see is what you get. It’s not breaking any ground nor is it trying particularly hard to frighten the audience. Perhaps a commitment to family friendly fare defanged it from leaning harder into creature feature territory.

Directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who wrote A Quiet Place, 65 is almost like a no-frills version of Jurassic Park with the spectacle removed.

But Driver gives a Driver-level performance and it’s a tight 90 minutes. And those two aspects alone are enough for a passable dino actioner.

Rating: 3/5

65 is in cinemas now