65’s twist makes the dino-fighting movie just a little more interesting
Is a twist a twist if it twists right in the first five minutes of a movie? According to Sony Pictures, yes — which is why marketing for 65 has emphasized the part where Adam Driver fights dinosaurs on a prehistoric planet Earth rather than answering the question of how he got there in the first place. But the truth left me absolutely giddy.
“After a cataclysmic crash on an unknown planet,” reads Sony’s carefully worded plot description for 65, “pilot Mills (Adam Driver) quickly discovers he’s actually stranded on Earth… 65 million years ago.”
But here is the thing: Mills does not discover that he’s actually stranded on Earth 65 million years ago!
[Ed. note: The following interview contains spoilers for 65.]
That’s because Mills has never been to Earth, or even heard of the planet. There is no time travel in 65; the pilot’s crash was simply a work accident during a routine shipping mission across the galaxy, coordinated by beings from another planet. Driver isn’t “human” — he’s an alien!
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Finding an organic way back to the time of the dinosaurs was a naturally tricky endeavor, according to writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, and even more so when they landed on the idea that Mills would arrive on Earth from an entirely different civilization.
“We needed it to feel grounded,” Beck says of the challenge. “There were wild ideas that were left on the page, like Adam speaking another language, or different facial modifications [to make him look more alien]. But we needed to find a blend where we didn’t lose the audience in the first five minutes. We were always pressure-testing.”
The duo spent a good portion of preproduction on 65 weighing world-building options with production designer Kevin Ishioka. The
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