Just the Ticket #137: 65

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Ticketmaster

The title of the movie up for thrashing--I mean, "up for review"--in today's special issue of Just the Ticket is 65, which refers to the time of the extinction of the dinosaurs roughly sixty-five million years B.C. For those who don't know, the B.C. abbreviation means "before Christ," and Sunday is Easter, the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ that is commercially represented by pagan fertility symbolism like rabbits, chicks, and eggs (and specifically, a rabbit that somehow lays eggs even though that's not how rabbits or the majority of mammalian species work). So there's my six degrees on why I'm reviewing what I'm reviewing today.

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I love dinosaurs. I annoyed my grade school librarian with how many books I checked out on the subject. I've read Carnosaur and both Jurassic Park books multiple times and watched the Jurassic Park movies even more times. I grew up on the original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and gave the short-lived Extreme Dinosaurs cartoon a fair shake.

But I also had to watch 65 last week.

Written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (A Quiet Place) and produced by Sam Raimi (Evil Dead, Don't Breathe, and the Poltergeist remake), 65 follows Mills (Kylo Ren himself, Adam Driver), pilot of the Nostromo's dragonfly penis, as he crash-lands on prehistoric Earth and must lead an annoying indigenous girl named Koa (Barbie's Ariana Greenblatt) on a possibly suicidal journey through dinosaur-infested (unless the plot says otherwise) woodlands to an escape pod that may or may not exist and/or function. Along the way, he makes stupid decisions like taking off his space helmet on an alien planet with no intel on the atmosphere, bludgeoning an attacking dinosaur with the butt of his energy rifle (to be fair, he does need that conserved ammo for later, and is somehow able to fire it after running out of ammo because this is an action? movie, but I don't know what else to qualify that with now that I've said, "but," and this movie sucks, so back to the bashing), and saying they need to stay on course and immediately diverting from their course to do stupid shit that is supposed to be funny, cute, and/or emotionally endearing, but just pointlessly pads the 93-minute runtime between the few dinosaur attacks. Also, there's the thing that irked me before the title drop (which completely spoils what fractionally assed attempt this movie makes at having a twist) where Mills, who is presumably a human (because there wasn't enough money left in the special effects budget after all the location shooting in Louisianna, spaceship sets, green screen, and CGI dinosaurs to make anyone look alien), doesn't know what a dinosaur looks like.

But, yeah; the "big twist" of the movie is that Koa, Mills, his wife and sick daughter, and the rest of the crew (who died off camera like Newt and Hicks between Aliens and Alien 3) are all aliens from sixty-five million years in Earth's past. Not Planet Of the Apes-style time travelers from an alternate future Earth or anything cool like that; they're just aliens who look like humans, and Mills and crew just happened to get knocked off course in their flimsy, phallic-looking dragonfly ship by the very asteroid field that was home to the very asteroid, on the very day, that was the extinction event that killed the dinosaurs. And I had to read the Wikipedia plot summary to even understand that because 65 is a movie that looks decent while being and telling almost nothing. If I had to say anything positive about it aside from the digital visuals, there is something with Mills and his sick daughter as he watches transmissions from her (which shouldn't be possible because the ship is a flimsy, burning wreck with failed systems everywhere) as their time apart and the hopeless distance and time dilation of space travel wreak havoc on his emotions, and he kind of treats Koa as a surrogate daughter despite being a lying dick to her to get where he needs to go. There's definitely some heart there. But if I wanted to watch a good version of that, I would have re-watched Interstellar instead of subjecting myself to this borefest.

F

Speaking of borefests (which rhymes with gorefests), I'll see you on Easter Sunday for a look at the Bunnyman trilogy.

Please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, fertilize the comments section at the bottom of this post because it needs to be resurrected, help out my ad revenue as you read, and hop over to follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the freshest eggs of news on my content.

Ticketmaster,

Out.