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65 (2023)
Adam Driver crash-lands his spaceship on a planet full of dinosaurs and proceeds to have less fun than that summary might suggest. Teaming up with the kid from Stuck in the Middle, he has to get to his escape pod 15km away.
On the plus side, it's nice to see a sci-fi(ish) action(ish) movie that isn't a superhero franchise. There are a couple of scenes which are quite tense, especially if you find caves tense. It's not the worst thing you could put on while eating your popcorn.
Unfortunately there is very little that's fresh about it. There's a lot of sci-fi shorthand that just doesn't add up (like why has an exploratory mission got cryo-frozen passengers anyway). The computer states the obvious for the benefit of the audience, "initiating proximity scan" (imagine if your phone told you that out loud every time you tried to use Google maps...). There is a handy bit of tech for every plot eventuality.
Because there are only two characters, you know they aren't going to die yet, so the constant peril doesn't have the tension it should and the jump scares get tedious ten minutes in. There's nothing here to rival the car scene or the kitchen scene in Jurassic Park. The narrative beats are painfully guessable - every time it looks like certain death for a character, you just know the other one is going to appear out of nowhere and save them. The storyline about his sick daughter was, like everything else, a little too on the nose.
I guessed the ending quite early on and still facepalmed when it happened.
What this film reminded me of most of all was The Good Dinosaur. I'm still not sure exactly who it was for - too cheesy for adults and too scary for kids.
Adam Driver crash-lands his spaceship on a planet full of dinosaurs and proceeds to have less fun than that summary might suggest. Teaming up with the kid from Stuck in the Middle, he has to get to his escape pod 15km away.
On the plus side, it's nice to see a sci-fi(ish) action(ish) movie that isn't a superhero franchise. There are a couple of scenes which are quite tense, especially if you find caves tense. It's not the worst thing you could put on while eating your popcorn.
Unfortunately there is very little that's fresh about it. There's a lot of sci-fi shorthand that just doesn't add up (like why has an exploratory mission got cryo-frozen passengers anyway). The computer states the obvious for the benefit of the audience, "initiating proximity scan" (imagine if your phone told you that out loud every time you tried to use Google maps...). There is a handy bit of tech for every plot eventuality.
Because there are only two characters, you know they aren't going to die yet, so the constant peril doesn't have the tension it should and the jump scares get tedious ten minutes in. There's nothing here to rival the car scene or the kitchen scene in Jurassic Park. The narrative beats are painfully guessable - every time it looks like certain death for a character, you just know the other one is going to appear out of nowhere and save them. The storyline about his sick daughter was, like everything else, a little too on the nose.
I guessed the ending quite early on and still facepalmed when it happened.
What this film reminded me of most of all was The Good Dinosaur. I'm still not sure exactly who it was for - too cheesy for adults and too scary for kids.