65

 Despite having Adam Driver fighting dinosaurs, "65" falls short of being an exciting movie. The film had a whopping $91 million budget and even featured in a Super Bowl ad, yet it failed to deliver. Instead of embracing its B-movie roots, it attempts to blend a survival story with family drama, resulting in rushed and underdeveloped elements that fail to resonate with viewers. The characters lack depth, and the action sequences quickly become repetitive and tiresome. The movie's reliance on jump scares, an overbearing score, and clichéd running and screaming moments become tedious.

However, the film's writing-directing team, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, known for co-writing "A Quiet Place" with John Krasinski, presents an intriguing premise. The story is set 65 million years ago and suggests the existence of futuristic civilizations on planets across the universe. Driver stars as Mills, a space pilot on a two-year exploratory mission to save his sick daughter's life. When his ship gets destroyed in an asteroid field, Mills and Koa (played by Ariana Greenblatt), the only survivor, must trek to a mountaintop to secure an escape pod before dinosaurs attack.

Although the film offers some startling moments with its creatures, some of the dinosaur visuals look fake and cheesy. The movie would have been better if it leaned harder into its silliness and played up the absurdity of mixing complex technology with the Cretaceous period. Mills' advanced gadgets are rarely used in any inspired ways, and the attempts at humor fall flat. There's no real bond between Mills and Koa, and the moments of peril wrap up too tidily.

Unfortunately, Driver's talent is underutilized in the film as his character is blandly heroic and annoyed. Greenblatt does her best with a character we know nothing about, but Koa's exchanges with Mills mainly consist of mimicking the basic words he says to her. Although the film has some clever camerawork, it also has erratic editing choices and borrows heavily from the "Jurassic Park" franchise.

The film only becomes enjoyably nutty towards the end, with a climactic combination of a sneaky quicksand patch, a ravenous Tyrannosaurus rex, a well-timed geyser eruption, and a catastrophic asteroid shower. However, it's too little too late for both the movie and the planet. "65" is now in theaters.