★☆☆☆☆
Out now
cert:12 A

65, a Sci-Fi adventure starring acclaimed indie actor and Star Wars favourite Adam Driver came out last week in the UK, but unless you were following very closely, you wouldn’t know it. So what exactly is wrong with the film that warranted such a cloak-and-dagger release - 65 wasn’t screened to critics and had very little publicity around it. Well, a lot, actually.

After accepting a mission that is set to take him away from his wife Alya (Nika King) and ailing daughter Nevine (Chloe Coleman), astronaut Mills (Driver) crash lands on Earth 65 million years ago whilst transporting a number of people kept in cryogenic sleep. Alongside the only other survivor, a young girl named Koa (Ariana Greenblatt), Mills battles to stay alive in a prehistoric world where dinosaurs roam the Earth.

Aside from a puzzlingly meandering screenplay, 65’s biggest problem is that it gets the science very wrong. With 65 relating to the number of million years since the end of the Cretaceous period - which was ended by a planet-killing asteroid - it is important to mention that in the last decade, geologists have revised that number to 66 million years ago, which means had Driver’s character crash landed at that period, he would've encountered a completely different set of obstacles and no dinosaurs at all. 

The other issue from the standpoint of the genre, 65 simply doesn’t know what kind of Sci-Fi movie it wants to be. Half Tarkovsky-esque space saga, half disaster movie, the film fails to succeed in either genres and in the end, we are left wondering how a 90-minute film feels more like a 3-hour long slog.

While It’s easy to see what attracted such an accomplished actor to the original premise, nobody in their right mind would in any way be happy with such fumbling execution. 65 is likely to leave fans of Driver bereft and wondering exactly what went wrong here. It is a real shame to see such a huge talent wasted on such a lacklustre production.