65 (2023)
Director: Scott Beck, Bryan Woods
Monster movies are horror, but are dinosaurs monsters? Of course. Jurassic Park is horror, just for kids as well as adults. Now that we’ve cleared that up, 65 is about an alien (to all intents and purposes a human) who gets stranded on Earth when an asteroid hits his ship sixty-five million years ago. There is a fellow survivor. There are a series of desperate challenges. There are dinosaurs.
65 is a terrible title. The card at the beginning tells us the story happened 65 million years ago. Perhaps there are no good titles left. It’s also a weird premise, but Adam Driver knows how to be an emotionally repressed soldier, and Ariana Greenblatt is marvellous as the other survivor. The story is frustratingly emotionally manipulative. To its credit, the eighty-eight minutes fly by. I love sub ninety-minute films.
There isn’t much more to say about it. As I write this, Dad’s moved on to watch the latest episode of Wheels of Time. These are the sorts of stories that pulled him through life. Fantasy, action, science-fiction. Most genre films are mediocre, but they serve a psychological function. I wonder how much of his story addiction is now in me? What was his influence on me as a child? Am I numbing myself with this shit?