65 Review New 65 trailer sees Adam Driver tackle the best dinosaur movie trailers of 2022

Since they are the subject of the biggest blockbuster in history (Jurassic Park, of course), it’s a wonder Hollywood hasn’t embraced dinosaurs more. Bringing young children’s wildest dreams to life seems like a clear win for blockbuster filmmakers looking for paleontological fun in film; Special effects wizards like Ray Harryhausen and Phil Tippett once kept them alive in the cinematic imagination, but nowadays, off the continuum Jurassic series, dinosaurs on the big screen are a rare beast.

Now, finally, comes this dinosaur disaster movie from Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who, as per their screenplay A quiet place – sketched another simple but effective sci-fi premise: what if an astronaut from another world crashed on our planet 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous? It’s a central idea that redefines dinosaurs not as the terrifyingly beautiful lizards that captivated young minds in science class, but as terrifyingly unknown and deadly aliens.

This is a very simple and effective kind of blockbuster. After a rather dark exposition on his home planet that calls him a sad fellow father, Adam Driver’s Mills crashes to Earth in ten minutes. There’s so little fat here, it’s almost skeletal: not counting the prehistoric beasts, there are only four speaking roles, and one of them doesn’t even speak English. That would be Koa (Ariana Greenblatt), Mills’ surviving companion, who quickly assumes the role of surrogate daughter for the real one, who has an unspecified condition (we’ll call it “Character Motivation Syndrome”).

In the configuration of the astronaut who falls on a planet that appears to be ours, there are faint echoes of Planet of the Apes, but Beck and Woods aren’t particularly interested in making satirical comments about our world, past or present. Instead, the film embarks on a simple genre exercise, a survival thriller that at times draws on the filmmakers’ horror undertones. The sheer hostility of prehistoric nature means that danger is always lurking, always experienced with some degree of stress.

It works pretty much as expected: there are problems that need to be fixed; there is a path that forces the characters to go from A to B; there is, needlessly, the strange Tyrannosaurus rex between these two points. The dinosaurs are fun and scary (although, sorry paleontologists! None of them have feathers here), and while plot holes loom like falling asteroids, it’s at least very well presented, mixing with some epic landscape cinematography, including lush. in Louisiana’s Kisatchie National Forest, with strong and subtle CGI.

It’s also joined by a typically compelling performance from Adam Driver. as he did in three Star Wars In his films, Driver takes his gender character into consideration even when the script doesn’t, a humanistic approach that grounds the explosive silliness that surrounds him. He also shares an easy warmth with Greenblatt, despite their characters speaking different languages, as his character hails from the “higher reaches” of his homeworld. They are admirably committed to the current project.

Sixty-five it does not innovate in cinematographic matters, it does not circumvent the rules, it does not challenge clichés. But it’s a great short film, clean and largely original, independent of any franchise or intellectual property, at a time when that concept is on the verge of dying out. Also, there’s a T-Rex on it. Sometimes that’s enough.