65: Extinction Event Imminent, Who Cares!

65 million years ago, a long range exploratory space ship of an advanced humanoid race is hit by an uncharted asteroid belt and crash lands on Earth, Earth of 65 million years ago!.  The only two survivors, the pilot Mills (Adam Driver) and a nine-year-old girl named Koa (Ariana Greenblatt) who doesn’t speak the same language as Mills (Mills speaks English, or at least that is what the audience hears) must try to survive in a very hostile environment.  An escape ship that can get them off planet and back to their home world is approximately 15 kilometers (9 miles) away, on the top of a mountain.  Mills and Koa set out on their perilous journey with no way of actually communicating with each other, but none the less, the two develop a parent / child bond, which is put to the test through several dinosaur and primordial creature attacks.  There are other dangers that face the pair that make it imperative for the two to get off world as soon as possible.  Can Mills and Koa survive the ordeal, or will they become dino chow?  Watch and find out!

This isn’t really a bad movie, it has a lot going for it, but it wasn’t a great movie either.  It sort of fits in that category of films that are entertaining enough to watch once but are highly forgettable.  And then, all of the sudden, because it made money, the studios will probably do a lower budget sequel with not as good actors and all the sudden we have an absurd franchise that has the quality of a SyFy channel “Sharknado” style film (sorry, went off on a tangent there). This film has some really nice moments and Adam Driver does a great job as the fatherly figure who shows both love and frustration towards his new ward.  Ariana Greenblatt has the harder job, she must show the same range of emotion and communicate her intentions without using any words that the audience can understand, and she does this quite well.  There are a few emotional scenes that do tug at the heartstrings, but nothing too drastic, and there is a couple of edge of your seat moments, but again nothing that extreme.

The overall production value is pretty good. The music is well composed and sets the appropriate tone for what is happening in each scene. The use of light and shadow was utilized well in some scenes, for example, in a particular instance where the glimpse of the T-Rex is only seen when a flash of lightning illuminates the area for a split second.  I will say that some of the dinosaurs looked a bit different then they normally are portrayed, and I am not which is more or less historically accurate, as we seem to have new theories every day about what dinosaurs actually looked like and how they moved and hunted.  The same holds true for the locational setting.  The movie mainly takes place in a woodsy type of forest and not the tropical jungle that you normally see in dinosaur films.  I didn’t find this odd or distracting at all, but I have heard some critics felt the setting looked too much like modern day Earth. Since 99% of all animal and plant life died off, it looks strange to see all the modern-day flora and it comes off as sloppy work on the producer’s part.  I did like the use of technology without having full on explanations of what each item was.  We learn it’s use by the context of how it was being used, which made the science-fiction side of the film feel more like science and less like fiction.

It is hard to pinpoint why this isn’t a great movie, it has good acting, an exciting and moving story, and realistic special effects.  Possibly it just didn’t take it far enough.  There was a subtlety to almost every aspect of the film, which I initially liked, but this may have muted the overall impact the audience feels, negating a bit of the connection one has with the characters and the story.  The connection is still there, it just isn’t strong enough to really make you care. Just my theory.