65 had so much potential but couldn’t overcome its weird story restrictions.
65 is not the horrible movie many recited claim it to be. It’s a decent sci-fi survival thriller with a handful of fun, suspenseful sequences but a slower pace and some strange story decisions kept the film from being the stand-out it had the potential to be. Two major writing choices held the movie back:
SPOILERS AHEAD
Killing every other person on board the ship leaving only the pilot and a nine-year-old girl to survive the dangers of prehistoric Earth minimized the threat and tension of the film. The audience reasonably assumes these two characters will survive at least to the end of the film and prevents the dangers from having any real bite (literally). Allowing for more survivors would have given more characters to fall prey to the terrors around them and raised the tension and the pace of the film.
Why did the writers choose to make the only two characters of the film speak two different languages? It reduced the dialogue to clunky and rudimentary exchanges that were annoying and mostly irrelevant. Having the young girl in shock and not speak at the beginning but slowly say more and more as she trusts the pilot would have been a better way to show development.
65 wasn’t a great or even a good movie, but it wasn’t bad either. I wasn’t disappointed with seeing it once on $5 Tuesday at the theater. It could have been epic, but a limiting screenplay and a lack of on-screen action prevented 65 from being anything better than decent.