InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 10

FILM REVIEWS
why do the characters have the keys to it?). Meanwhile, Scream
4’s Kirby (Hayden Panetierre) is also back as an FBI agent, and of
course Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) needs a paycheck, too,
prompting this movie’s movie geek character to embark on a
truly embarrassing diatribe about the vulnerability of “legacy”
characters. Why do the Scream movies always have to have their
characters talk about movies like they’re in an 8th grade
after-school film club?
Outside of some briefly effective bits that you could count on one
hand, there’s nothing exciting about any of this. The Scream
structure has become so ossified and the films’ direction so
generic that the entire enterprise is fully diluted. All that’s left is
for the audience to wait until the end when the villain's or villains'
identity is revealed. This one isn’t quite as easy to call as the last
one, but anybody paying the least bit of attention will probably
still figure out most of it. Meanwhile, Wes Craven’s literate but
prankster-ish personality is once again sorely missed; Scream 3
wasn’t a very good movie either, but there’s not a single idea in
this movie as good as the scene in that one where heroine Sid is
chased through a film set of the childhood home where she’d
previously survived multiple murder attempts. As Mindy the
movie geek says at one point here: “Fuck this franchise.” —
MATT LYNCH
DIRECTOR: Tyler Gillett & Matt Bettinelli-Olpin; CAST: Melissa
Barrera, Jenna Ortega, Courtney Cox; DISTRIBUTOR: Paramount
Pictures; RELEASE DATE: March 10; RUNTIME: 2 hr., 3 min.
65
Scott Beck, Bryan Woods
One of the most accomplished actors of his generation, equally
adept at conveying volcanic rage and soft-spoken humility, Adam
Driver’s greatest gift arguably is that he has fantastic taste in
material. Cribbing from Tom Cruise’s early career playbook, Driver
has prioritized appearing in original screenplays and working
with the era’s preeminent filmmakers over showing up in
franchises and extended cinematic universes (even his time
spent in a galaxy far, far away came with the promise of being
directed by J.J. Abrams, which seemed like a good idea back
when the project was first announced). Driver’s still in his thirties
and has already worked with the likes of Scorsese, Spielberg, the
Coens, Ridley Scott, Jarmusch, Carax, Spike Lee, Soderbergh, and
Baumbach (and he still has Michael Mann’s Ferrari, presumably
due later this year). All of which is to say, when Driver appears in
a dud like 65, it stands out all the more. It’s not simply that he’s
better than the film, it’s that he must realize it, and so one finds
themselves leaning forward, trying to make sense of what even
attracted the actor to the role in the first place. Perhaps he
wanted to make something his young child could appreciate, or
maybe he secretly longed to film a dinosaur movie, or (most
likely) it simply paid well and coincided with a gap in his
schedule. Whatever the reason, the resulting film doesn’t serve
him especially well, nor he it.
Established in an opening title card that the film is set millions of
years in the past on the other side of the universe — one could
imagine this playing as a Planet of the Apes-like revelation for the
audience, spoiled by overeagerness — where stoic spaceman and
#GirlDad Mills (Driver) has made the difficult decision to embark
on a two-year-long mission, ferrying passengers across the
cosmos in order to make enough money for his daughter’s
life-saving medical treatment. Serving as pilot and sole
passenger not tucked away in cryostasis, Mills is jarred awake
mid-mission as his ship flies into an uncharted asteroid field.
With his ship suffering catastrophic damage, jettisoning cryo
pods all the way down, Mills makes an emergency crash landing
on an unsettled planet inhabited by hostile “alien” creatures that
the viewer will recognize as dinosaurs (again, this is something
that might have been fun to discover while watching the film
instead of being front and center in its marketing campaign).
With his ship irreparably crippled, all his passengers dead, and
seemingly no hope for rescue, Mills steps outside with the
intention of blowing his brains out, only to be halted by memories
of his adorable daughter and the sight of one of the stray cryo
pods with a passenger still alive inside of it. Upon rescuing young
Koa (Ariana Greenblatt), a child around his daughter’s age who
rather inconveniently doesn’t speak English, Mills rediscovers his
sense of purpose and sets out with his young ward to find the
escape craft attached to the other half of his ship all while
avoiding T-Rexes, quicksand, killer parasites, and other
Cretaceous-era dangers.
Despite its high-concept premise, 65 is fundamentally modest in
its ambitions. Running a brisk 93 minutes (one of the best
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