CINEMASCOPE NATURE AND THE NARRATIVE.

In the Adam Driver-starrer 65 - whose premise comes dangerously close to the Will Smith starrer, M. Night Shyamalan-directed sci-fi disaster After Earth - a pilot takes a two-year space exploratory job to transport people on to a far-off planet, but crashes on to prehistoric Earth, where dinosaurs roam the planet (ergo: the 65-million-year historical reference). Instead of the father-son angle of the latter film, we have a father-daughter story ... of sorts.

The pilot, Mills, had taken the job to pay for the medical bills of his terminally-ill daughter (Chloe Coleman), and after the crash that cleaves his ship in two, he stumbles upon a sprightly, nine-year-old girl Koa from his passenger list (Ariana Greenblatt, who looks like a 15-year-old).

Koa's folks perished when the spaceship fell to Earth, the ship's super-intelligent scanning system tells Mills. The language translators are damaged though, so Koa and Mills have to resort to archaic means of simple gestures to understand and bond during the film's meagre 93-minute runtime.

65 is written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, whose last well-known credit is the nail-biting thriller A Quiet Place, and directed by John Krasinski. While Beck and Woods don't exhibit the same finesse as Krasinski, they do a better job than Shyamalan. Most of Mills and Koa's story is a straightforward trek to a mountain where the only functional escape pod lies. In their way are velociraptors, tyrannosaurus rexs, and hurtling towards their head is the giant meteor that will end the reign of the dinosaurs.

Director John Krasinski's 65 is an okay film that one is likely to forget soon

This is a scant film with a surprisingly controlled budget. The cost of production is 45 million dollars - a fraction of the cost of your typical Hollywood blockbuster. That's not to say that the production lacks quality. The production design, coupled with real-world shooting locations (the bulk of the film was shot in Kisatchie National Forest...

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