There’s something adorably quaint about the recent sci-fi action picture 65, in which a sweaty Adam Driver going to intergalactic war with dinosaurs in Earth’s futuristic past.  Driver is technically playing a space alien, but he has no physical features that distinguish him from Earthling humanity: no antennae, no fins, no gills, nothing beyond his usual unique physique.  When he arrives on Earth, he removes his helmet and vocally declares the air breathable.  His weapon against our prehistoric planet’s dinosaur creatures is a ray gun.  Whether intentionally or not, 65 is essentially a dumb-as-rocks throwback to 1950s schlock.  It plays like a basic-premise remake of an MST3k punching bag with a title like Beasts of a Savage World or Journey to the Planet Earth, updated with modern CG but thankfully not softened with modern self-referential irony.  There isn’t much to the film beyond its bar napkin premise, in which Driver drives a spaceship into Earth’s dirt 65 million years ago, then fights off the dinosaurs (and dino-adjacent monsters) that attempt to eat him along with the only other survivor of the crash.  The film’s only real value beyond the novelty of watching Driver shoot laser guns at dinosaurs, then, is in comparing how differently modern action schlock handles the premise from how Atomic Age sci-fi might have over half a century ago.

The major modern affect that drags down 65‘s entertainment value is the compulsion to overexplain itself with expositional context.  Directed by the screenwriters of the similarly weighed-down A Quiet Place—Scott Beck & Bryan Woods—the film is seemingly fearful of YouTube fanboy criticism of its “plot holes” & fanciful outlandishness.  Because humanity evolved after dinosaurs went extinct, Driver must belong to another humanoid race of people to share the screen with the towering beasts.  Surviving a spaceship crash alongside a young adolescent passenger is apparently not enough motivation for him to protect her against this far-out world’s Jurassic beasts; it’s also explained that he has a daughter of a similar age back on his homeworld, whose diaries in his absence are doled out through a device lifted wholesale from Interstellar.  Between the film’s opening storybook narration informing us that these events occur “prior to the advent of mankind, in the infinity of space” and the unnecessary prologue set on Driver’s alien planet, it isn’t until 40 minutes into the runtime that our hero actually shoots a laser beam at a dinosaur.  And since the film is only worth the novelty of its one-sentence premise, that’s a huge problem.  If 65 were made in the 1950s, Driver would’ve been from Earth, crash-landed on a similar planet with its own dinosaurs, immediately opened fire, smooched an “alien” babe, discovered in a last-minute twist that he had merely time-traveled backwards, and the whole thing would’ve been wrapped up in 65 minutes to leave room for the next movie on the drive-in double bill.  The dinosaurs would’ve been stop-motion too, and maybe even borrowed from the footage of a better-funded picture.  Roger Corman is still alive & working somewhere out there, but Hollywood really doesn’t make efficient, delirious schlock like it used to, mostly because every fanciful creative impulse now has to be “justified” to keep online cynics at bay.

Still, I appreciated that this modern DTV action treatment of a retro pulp sci-fi premise never slips into winking-at-the-camera Deadpool irony.  Although Driver has a knack for comedic delivery, the world is better off being spared of his alien-invasion equivalent of Kong: Skull Island.  I suspect that happened because Beck & Woods are largely humorless in their craft and were somehow unaware that they were making 1950s sci-fi pastiche in the first place.  Whatever the reason, the movie’s self-serious tone is a great counterbalance to its glaringly unserious premise.  Its internal aversion to irony & camp does mean that it’s a little boring in stretches (especially in the dino-free opening half), but it’s a pleasant, cozy kind of boring.  65 is crash-landing on Netflix soon, but its ultimate, ideal presentation is in afternoon daylight programming on whatever basic cable channel dads nap to these days.  As a creature feature, it’s got a playfully unscientific approach to what counts as a “dinosaur.”  As an Adam Driver vehicle, it’s going to make for a delightfully odd footnote in what’s sure to be a delightfully odd movie star career.  It was also partially filmed in Louisiana swamps (the parts that weren’t filmed against green screens on New Orleans sound stages), which gives it an extra layer of novelty for local napping dads, too tired to find the clicker.

-Brandon Ledet