65 (2023) Dir: Scott Beck & Bryan Woods
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I remember seeing the trailers for this Scott Beck and Bryan Woods directed sci-fi film, and knowing immediately that this was not going to be a good film. As such, I decided not to go and see it, which not too many others did either. That said, when I saw it was now streaming, I figured it could at least be entertaining in a 'so bad it's good' kind of way.
I felt a lof of frustration towards the film's cinematography. It was almost a nice film to look at, but it was hounded by consistently horrible framing. It meant that the audience never see as much of the scenes as they really should, and never get to appreciate the scope of the setting within which the story takes place.
To give the film its credit, it was actually a fair cool concept for a film. However, that is where my compliments for it end. The execution was horrible. The film had a repetitive and boring narrative, which suffered greatly from the "and then, and then" habit that very poor stories tend to have. It would have been way more interesting if it hadn't been so relentlessly monotonous.
The film's attempt at depth relied heavily on a father-daughter dynamic, which, while sweet, was heavily and consistently thwarted by a frustratingly poor and repetitive language barrier dynamic, which just ground down any momentum that the film tried to conjure up. The film would likely have faired much better if that aspect had been removed.
Adam Driver tried so hard to make something of this role, but he was very much swimming upstream. He did have some fairly good moments, in fairness. I don't think it was a bad performance from Driver, but it certainly wasn't one of his vintage displays. I will say, however, that those scenes where he had more of a fatherly role were his better ones.
Ariana Greenblatt suffered greatly from the film's writing, which essentially left her striving to create something interesting from a clumsily composed alien language and a shallow character arc. In short, she was doomed. Unfortunately, I thought she did not do too well with it, and ended up coming across a little poorly.
Chloe Coleman is also worth mentioning for her role in the film, albeit it was a substantially smaller one than the other two actors in the film. While her character was terribly written, dialogue-wise, I thought that Coleman's actual acting wasn't too bad, for the most part.
Overall, I think it was quite clear that this was a pretty terrible film. It failed to capitalise on what could've been a fun premise, and instead provided a terribly dull slog of a sci-fi adventure. Even the dinosaurs were somehow underutilised and disappointing. Unfortunately, there wasn't much to be found in the way of redeeming factors for this one.
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