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In the Flesh: 65
🕑 Added 2023-04-10 23:05:26 +0000 UTC65 is a frictionless narrative object, a surface upon which human scrutiny can find neither purchase nor traction. Why is the pre-human society of the planet Somaris near-identical to our own? Why does Mills (Adam Driver) speak English while Koa (Ariana Greenblatt) speaks a conlang? Why set a movie during the Cretaceous period if you’re just going to completely make up your dinosaurs? Writer/directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods don’t so much wave off these and other questions as they do skate past them with that special oblivious calm only a fundamentally incurious person can really master. 65 evinces no curiosity at any point in its mercifully brief runtime. It has no interest in its characters, no interest in its setting, no interest in its creatures — the film’s only element to display signs of human attention is the half-baked dad fantasy of protecting your innocent daughter from monsters it’s completely okay to rip into with high-tech firearms and explosives.
The film’s brutal disinterest in the dinosaurs it relies on to drive its narrative renders its already poorly blocked and paced action vaguely nauseating to watch. Where’s the triumph in seeing some guy blast these animals into chunks from afar? Our one flicker of empathy, Koa’s insistence on rescuing a baby dinosaur from a mud pit only to watch in horror as a pack of raptors kill it and drag it off into the undergrowth is so perfunctory as to be laughable. Otherwise nothing we see behaves in any recognizable way like a real animal. They don’t fear fire or loud noises, they don’t abandon hunts that become disadvantageous, they don’t seem to have any behaviors at all other than stalking and killing whatever they can find. They behave more like enemies in a shoddy first-person shooter game than they do the kind of frightening, unpredictable animals that might have made for some actual tension.
Finally, and perhaps most damningly, this is one of the ugliest movies I’ve seen in years. The lighting is muddy and careless, the costumes and sci-fi sets indifferent copy-pastes straight from the Mass Effect playbook, the CGI so bad and lifeless it brings to mind the promotional CD-ROM games cereal companies used to mail out to anyone who sent in a certain number of branded box tops. 65 is bad, and worse, it’s contemptuously and indifferently made. Driver and Greenblatt commit, for which they deserve commendation, but there’s nothing to commit to. Forty five million dollars spent by idiot suits to push you through a ripoff Jurassic Park theme park ride while you text on your phone and nap in the air conditioning.
