Film Review

65 (2023)

An extraterrestrial spacecraft crashes on Earth during the age of the dinosaurs…

Back in the days of film projection, occasionally a projectionist would forget to run one of the reels or get their order mixed up. The resulting viewing experience would be baffling (why is time running backwards for these characters?), or it could remain oddly coherent and leave audiences with only a mild sense something was missing…

The latter is my response to 65. It’s difficult not to grasp the basic plot; indeed, the film adroitly destroys any potential for surprise by literally spelling out its premise at the beginning with text reading “65 million years ago a visitor crash landed on earth”. (No Planet of the Apes-style final reel surprise here!) And almost everything that happens next is so predictable that discovering a missing reel wouldn’t make much difference.

Still, this weird mash-up of Jurassic Park (1993) and Deep Impact (1998) gives the impression that a greater profundity is about to be revealed. But the big revelation is… there isn’t one. 65 is an extraordinarily pedestrian sci-fi action thriller that manages to…