"Mills" (Adam Driver) undertakes a long space mission so he can earn enough money for his poorly daughter to have life-saving treatment. Along the route, their ship encounters an uncharted meteor storm and next thing he knows, he is marooned on a distinctly hostile planet with the only other survivor - the feisty young "Koa" (Ariana Greenblatt) for company, Their only hope is to reach a distant part of their wrecked mother ship in which there is an escape module that can propel them back into space where they might be rescued. Snag? Well they are not the only living creatures on this world - and without exception, the others all want "Mills" and "Koa" sandwiches for lunch, and - wait for it - there is a great big meteor on a collision course with the planet that is going to have an existential impact on their surroundings. What now ensues is a rather predictable series of "Jurassic Park" style adventures that offer the visual effects folks a chance to shine, but little else. Driver is completely unremarkable here, the escapades have little - or no - jeopardy and I just kept thinking this was just a sort of dinosaurs do "Degoba" style of adventure. I didn't hate it, and it will be fine on the telly at Christmas - but as a big screen experience it is weak, derivative and the star brings nothing at all to the party.

FULL SPOILER-FREE REVIEW @ https://www.msbreviews.com/movie-reviews/65-review "65 is as unimaginative and predictable as anticipated, only even less entertaining and far more bland. Adam Driver and Ariana Greenblatt try their best, but apart from the climactic ending that delivers one of the best visual executions of an asteroid colliding with a planet in recent years, there isn't a single memorable aspect in this movie that’s part of an already packed subgenre with many stories worthy of more attention. A dinosaur flick this uninteresting should be considered a cinephilic crime." Rating: D+

**65 had so much potential but couldn’t overcome its weird story restrictions.** 65 is not the horrible movie many recited claim it to be. It’s a decent sci-fi survival thriller with a handful of fun, suspenseful sequences but a slower pace and some strange story decisions kept the film from being the stand-out it had the potential to be. Two major writing choices held the movie back: *SPOILERS AHEAD* 1. Killing every other person on board the ship leaving only the pilot and a nine-year-old girl to survive the dangers of prehistoric Earth minimized the threat and tension of the film. The audience reasonably assumes these two characters will survive at least to the end of the film and prevents the dangers from having any real bite (literally). Allowing for more survivors would have given more characters to fall prey to the terrors around them and raised the tension and the pace of the film. 2. Why did the writers choose to make the only two characters of the film speak two different languages? It reduced the dialogue to clunky and rudimentary exchanges that were annoying and mostly irrelevant. Having the young girl in shock and not speak at the beginning but slowly say more and more as she trusts the pilot would have been a better way to show development. 65 wasn’t a great or even a good movie, but it wasn’t bad either. I wasn’t disappointed with seeing it once on $5 Tuesday at the theater. It could have been epic, but a limiting screenplay and a lack of on-screen action prevented 65 from being anything better than decent.

"65 is a taut 93 minutes of sweaty tension, appropriately scaled action and surprising tenderness..." Read the full review here: http://www.screen-space.net/reviews/2023/3/9/65.html