65 is that most satisfying of CGI films, the type that doesn’t wallow in what it can do visually, but rather uses the technology in furtherance of a moving film. It posits a visit to our planet 65 million years ago by humans who arrive at a momentous moment for our big blue marble.
The humans are Miller (Adam Driver) and Koa (Ariana Greenblatt). He’s the pilot hired for a two-year deep-space mission that will bring in three times his usual pay. The price for that pay is being away from his beloved wife (Nika King) and daughter (Chloe Coleman) for much longer than he ever has before. They need the money, as we learn, because even in a technologically advanced society capable and fully committed to space exploration, health care is still very expensive, and the daughter is catastrophically ill.
Koa is a nine-year-old passenger on the return trip, travelling cryogenically until an uncharted asteroid swarm hits Miller’s ship. The ensuing crash splits the ship in half, killing everyone else aboard and wounding Miller (though the hi-tech medical equipment on board the ship puts him most of the way to recovery from the metal shrapnel he took to the abdomen).
The bulk of the film is Miller and Koa, who speak different languages, trekking from the half of the ship in which they crashed to the other half, the one with the escape pod, currently sitting 15 kilometers away and on top of a mountain. This being the Earth of 65 million years ago, amid the flowering plants and coniferous forests, there lurks the type of fauna that sees these humans as food, not strange visitors from another world. Plus, the uncharted asteroid swarm that damaged the ship carrying them has a big, mean, asteroid in its midst that will, in short order, be wiping out the dinosaurs (as well as 75% of all other life on Earth).
This may be an interesting piece of speculative fiction, but the story itself is a character study of two people without a common language forced to rely on each other in order to survive. And in this it is, ahem, stellar. Driver, an ordinary guy with the proper sort of emergency training for his job, displays uncommon sensitivity and empathy for the child he can’t help but see through the lens of his daughter so many light-years away. It is a performance of strength and gentleness and a fair amount of controlled desperation as he encounters the ever-popular deinonychus almost as soon as he sets foot outside his half of the ship. As for Koa, described as being from the, perhaps, wild region of the Upper Territories, Greenblatt gives an emotionally charged performance that knows a child in shock would be silent not hysterical. She shows her own amount of controlled desperation to see her parents again after Miller, in equal measures of kindness and need to get her to cooperate, tells her using drawings and sign language that they are still alive and waiting for her on the mountain top. The jut of her chin coupled with the barest bite of the lip tells the story of what she is going through, and that she is a force motived to be reckoned with.
Audiences have long been accustomed to see dinosaurs plod and menace their way across film screens, and so it is incumbent on a director to present these creatures in ways that make it fresh. There is little one can do, I think, with a T. Rex attacking, but our introduction to the ancient creatures roaming here is with a slow reveal of a giant skeleton that evokes wary awe in Miller, giving us the same feeling as that rib cage just keeps on going. The writing is taut and quick-paced as this unlikely pair traverse a landscape that constantly surprises them and rarely with delight. The narrative necessity of them bonding is handled adroitly, with Koa proving to have more mettle (and ingenuity) than either Miller or we initially expected. The dangers continue until the end, with this nature, like Darwin’s description so much later, red in tooth and claw. Not to mention very big and very gooey bugs.
Kudos to the thought-process that gave us the advanced technology in use. It’s familiar enough to be recognizable, but slyly different. The rifle has limits, the canteen doubles as a food tester, and the computer isn’t all knowing, given its refrain after crashing that its location is unknown and the trajectory is off-course. There is also a nifty use of the portable version of the computer showing us what is happening to one of the characters in the otherwise total darkness of a cave.
Sure, there is the element of contrivance in 65 to have Miller and Koa be compatible with our air and water, and to arrive just as the Chicxulub asteroid arrives to end the Cretaceous Era. Never mind. It’s a chance for us to witness an educated guess at what it might have looked like in the time leading up to the fatal impact. And we get a great pot-boiler of an adventure, and a greatly involving story to go with it.
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