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JUSTIN TANNER REVIEWS 65
The business of going to the Cinema may have suffered from the one-two punch of the rise of streaming services and the spread of COVID, but the real problem — at least for the audiences hoping to return to the theatre — might just be the one element movie houses absolutely need to survive: people. Even with these new “no talking or texting” rules mandated by the AMC and Alamo Drafthouse — which definitely make the experience more tolerable than it was pre-pandemic — you never know when or how some smart aleck patron is going to obnoxiously challenge your movie going experience. Case in point: I saw writer/directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ dinosaur movie, “65”, last week and no sooner had the end credits started to roll when a couple of snarky patrons, clearly poised for the moment, burst into ridiculously loud, derisive laughter. It was a blatantly inauthentic, performative attempt to both publicly disdain a film that — one assumes — they hadn’t enjoyed, while trying to create an instant-hipster critique community, which, thankfully, failed miserably. And though I didn’t particularly love “65” — it’s well made, and efficient, which sadly passes for high praise these days, but I was hardly under a cinematic spell — I was involved enough to be unsettled by this rude and caustic outburst: I didn’t have even a second to contemplate what I’d seen before my experience was swamped and obliterated by these two tiresome clowns. And it’s not the first time I’d experienced a loudmouth patron who felt compelled to make their piteous influencer-wannabe opinion known to the general audience mere seconds after the movie’s end.
While stumbling, teary-eyed up the aisle after a screening of Todd Haynes’ 2002 retro-weeper “Far From Heaven”, a woman blurted out, loud enough for the entire theatre to hear, “Well that’s the worst movie I’ve seen in my LIFE!” Similarly, after the emotionally bruising finish of Luca Guadagnino’s 2017 gay romance “Call Me By Your Name”, while still in my seat, watching the credits and utterly transfixed by Timothée Chalamet’s agonized weeping, a gravelly male voice bellowed from the back of the house “That was like watching PAINT DRY!” Last week, as luck would have it, I ended up in an elevator with the two chuckleheads from the “65” screening while they giddily launched into a thirty-second critique of the film: Apparently there was an inconsistency about the weapon used to shoot a T-Rex which was still causing them to cackle like coke-addled teens. Additionally, a plot point involving the two main characters not speaking the same language resulted in a near apoplectic outrage: “It’s the future! They’re starting a new colony! They’d all speak the same language! I call bullshit!” What seems to be the issue with this “that would never happen!” line of thinking — is not the old adage about “a willing suspension of disbelief”. Rather, it’s a willing suspension of belief - the viewer’s inability to rise above a preordained conviction of how certain characters would or would not speak or act. Anything that falls outside the tight margins of their prefab ‘logic’ is deemed patently impossible. But by latching onto such ephemeral and picayune criteria, these armchair gadflies are missing the point. To be honest, “65”, with its impressive but hardly ground breaking CGI-dinosaurs and its lavish — though certainly not Avatar level — production design, would hardly be a blip on the action adventure horizon were it not for a few key factors, most pointedly, the dialog.
The kind of chit-chat we usually get whenever a Spielberg, Cameron or Gunn — or any of the other cartoon/superhero green screen epic directors — commission a script for their latest kiddie flick, is a groan-inducing, anachronistic yuk-fest, chock full of dad jokes: Every five minutes someone farts or clowns or makes a pop-culture reference designed to have the plebes rolling in the aisles. But “65” avoids this trap by keeping the talk to a minimum. Even with a couple of fourteen year old girls in the cast, we don’t get any goofy attempts at tension-leavening humor. The situations are grave and the characters treat them with a refreshingly apropos level of seriousness. Also, the plot device of having our leads, Adam Driver (”White Noise”) and Ariana Greenblatt (”In The Heights”) speak different languages makes inane banter an impossibility so we’re spared all the usual bad comedy that comes from one generation attempting to ingratiate itself with the other. But the real secret weapon of “65”, and what raises it to a higher-than-expected level of sheer artistry is Adam Driver’s totally committed performance. It is not damning with faint praise to declare “65” the best acting Driver has done in his career. He approaches the role with dogged sincerity and heartbreak and plays absolutely everything as if his life depends on it. He is the opposite of the typical cavalier superhero who merely blinks and shrugs and shows nary a scratch after being run over by a train. And Driver’s space pilot Mills may be buff and lean, but he’s easily and visibly hurt, as one would be after crashing a space ship into the side of mountain while fighting off an endless hoard of carnivorous therepods, as each crushing blow lands. The unfamiliar sight and sound of a leading man in an action film who is constantly wheezing, groaning and limping in convincing agony was like a breath of fresh air. The premise itself is smart and well executed and plays almost like a mirror of Hulu’s entertaining 2022 sci-fi flick “Prey” in which one of the aliens from the “Predator” franchise shows up in 18th century America. Here we get two humanoids from another galaxy who accidentally end up on Earth during the Cretaceous period.
In both cases, the technically superior species has to fight off a more primitive one leading to terrific variations on the David and Goliath scenario. Nothing particularly innovative or genuinely surprising happens during the movie’s tight 93 minutes, but it’s always moving, ratcheting up the tension and managing to keep us riveted to the ticking clock of the plot. Perhaps there are gaps in logic here and there: Greenblatt’s teenager Koa makes a few blunders — like using all of her futuristic hand grenades to defeat a medium sized dinosaur when one would clearly have been sufficient — but given the state of constant panic she’s in from the start, it’s understandable she might not perform with the finesse of a trained assassin. “65” may not great, but it’s genuinely good, which is really all a popcorn movie needs to be. And without the usual eye-rolling soft ball pitches aimed at the lowest common denominator crowd, it manages to do something relatively unfamiliar these days: not insult its audience. IN THEATERS
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