65 / YMMV - TV Tropes

Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: While sleeping in a cave, Mills wakes up to find Koa foaming at the mouth due to having some sort of bug parasite in her mouth, which he then removes. There is no foreshadowing for this scene, it doesn't affect the story, and is never brought up again afterwords.
Captain Obvious Reveal: The "irregularity" in the sky is the asteroid that wipes out the dinosaurs. Just about any layman would figure out what it is immediately, but Mills doesn't learn what it is until about the end of the second act.
Cliché Storm: The film's basic plot, of a Badass and Child Duo having to learn to work together to survive the elements, was criticised for being too similar to other stories common across the 2010s and early 2020s - likewise, the dinosaurs in the film got guff for being generic, spiky, grey reptiles indistinct from those seen in Jurassic World or in 2005's King Kong. At least the two aforementioned films have excuses that hand-waved inaccurate dinosaurs such as the former having dinosaurs with incomplete DNA being filled in by the DNA of other animals and the latter featuring dinosaurs that have considerably evolved for thousands of years on a remote island.
Narm: To those who know what the period was actually like, the film's attempts to paint nearly every aspect of late Cretaceous Earth (right down to the bugs and flora) as a savage Death World and all of its fauna as bloodthirsty Prehistoric Monsters may come across as unintentionally ridiculous.
Nightmare Fuel:
- Most of the dinosaurs in this movie look more like reptilian abominations than real life animals, with some being borderline Body Horror to those who know what dinosaurs are supposed to look like. Special mentions goes to quadrupedal theropods, naked Oviraptor and those weird looking pterosaurus.
- Animal and dinosaur lovers could easily see this movie as terrifying due to the constant deaths of animals (either being shoot by Mills, being killed by predators etc.) and how they're portrayed as violent beasts that only want death and blood of their victims, compared to real life carnivores who only hunt for food.
- Baby ankylo-t-rex stuck in the tar pit, while its siblings leave them behind. And when looked like that the poor critter will survive thanks to Mills and Koa... it got brutally killed by compy-like theropods.
- Quadrupedal theropod death. After cornering Mills on the geyser field with the intention of killing him for stabbing it in the eye, Koa stabs it in the second eye, resulting in enraged reptile activating the geyser on which it stood, resulting in hot water boiling it alive. If that dodo's death in Ice Age 2 wasn't gruesome enough...
- In general, Cretaceous Earth is depicted in this movie like a flat-out Death World, with somber environments and colors, in addition to being inhabitated by vicious carnivores.
- While Mills is exploring the marshland in which he crashed, a amphibian/eel like creature swims behind him. We never learn how it fully looks or how big it is.
So Okay, It's Average: While critics were harsh on the film, audiences were somewhat more forgiving. Although the film is similarly seen as being a bit dull, very predictable, overall wastes its premise, and unexceptional in terms of story, action, and characters, many viewers have nonetheless stated that it's entertaining enough as a middle-of-the-road sci-fi thriller.
Spiritual Successor:
- Being an adventure about a warrior fighting dinosaurs and other Prehistoric Monsters with futuristic weapons, 65 is probably the closest we're ever going to get to a Turok movie.
- To Planet of the Dinosaurs, in that both films deal with a lost spaceship that crash-lands on a planet populated with dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures.
- To After Earth, so much you could call this "Before Earth". Unexplored larger universe? Check. Spaceship crash? Check. Adult/Child dynamic? Check. Super-Persistent Predator? Check. Actually Earth a long time from now? Check.
- Also, thanks to its premise, this is one of the closest things we have to a movie adaptation of Carnivores, aside from the fact the film is not about trophy hunting, and the "humans" and the prehistoric species are respectively the aliens and the earthlings instead of the other way around.
Squick: Two scenes, both bug related. The first is when Mills accidentally swats at a huge bug on his neck and gets its innards all over his hand. Lucky for us, despite it being disgusting, Mills teasing Koa with his filthy, bug-guts covered hand was genuinely a cute and funny moment of bonding for them. The second is when Koa falls asleep in the cave and randomly gets some kind of parasite in her mouth that Mills has to carefully remove without killing her or causing the thing to scurry down her throat. The latter is more egregious since it has nothing to do with the plot and neither character really reacts to it in the aftermath, as mentioned above in Big-Lipped Alligator Moment.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
- Giant azhdarchid pterosaurs have a cameo flying above the protagonists at one point but, surprisingly for a film where Everything Is Trying to Kill You and the obvious cool factor of a flying creature the size of a giraffe attacking the heroes, the danger never comes up and the larger pterosaurs never seem to even notice the humans.
- The aquatic creature that swims behind Mills after he crash lands is never seen again, depriving the film of any aquatic creatures. Especially notable since several other bodies of water are visited later, giving it many chances to appear.
- The fact that all of the aggressive animals are carnivores was met with disappointment by viewers, since there has been increasing interest over the years in how aggressive plant-eaters can be. Early reels showing that the white quadrupedal theropod was originally a Triceratops didn't help matters.
- Generally speaking, many viewers were disappointed by the inaccurate and stereotypical dinosaurs, which have been criticized as one of many factors contributing to the film's perception as an unremarkable Cliché Storm (especially at a time when paleo-fans have become increasingly vocal in their criticism of works that cling to outdated interpretations of prehistoric fauna). Several reviewers have observed that more accurate dinosaur depictions could've gone a long way towards making the film stand out, even if absolutely nothing else about the plot or characters was changed.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
- A common complaint about this film is that it takes an inherently ridiculous premise of "futuristic Adam Driver fights dinosaurs" absolutely seriously and humourlessly in an ill-fated attempt to elevate it beyond its B-movie trappings, but instead makes what could have been a fun, self-aware schlock-fest into a boring snooze-fest.
- Mills and Koa survive the crash while every other passenger is killed by the impact. As these characters would have been quickly killed off anyway, it seems a strange waste of the film by getting rid of them offscreen in such an anticlimactic fashion rather than have a few survive the crash only to be eaten by dinosaurs, establishing just how dangerous the fauna of prehistoric Earth are. As it is since both Miles and Koa survive, the dinosaurs never actually kill anyone.
- Mills and Koa being aliens, and the planet being Earth in the past, are absolutely meaningless as far as the story goes. If you removed the opening titles and the establishing shot of their home planet, you could turn this into a movie about a human landing on an alien planet where dinosaur-like creatures exist with literally no other changes. This would have gone a long way to getting around the terrible dinosaur designs, as well (since the animals wouldn't actually be dinosaurs).
- Indeed, this could easily be a human time-travel movie instead of a "from space" movie and it would change the story little.
- It also could've been really cool to have a modern decent budget film recreate what the prevailing theory is about the look and feel of the Earth when the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs hit it. The film cuts away without showing us the magnitude of the damage and in a world that doesn't have that many instances of someone recreating the KT event with modern technology, it's a disappointment that this film didn't attempt it. We only see a time lapse in the end credits that shows the ice age and moves into the eventual arrival of people.
Took the Bad Film Seriously: As much as many might complain that it doesn't save a film that plays its ridiculous premise very seriously, Adam Driver and Arianna Greenblatt both bring their A-game and do their best with the material they're given, producing incongruously sincere performances that do help elevate the film to "average."
Uncertain Audience: The movie arrived to a poor critical reception with many reviewers wondering why a film with such an inherently gonzo premise — aliens vs. dinosaurs — was played so seriously and drably rather than embracing its silliness and goofiness. Meanwhile, dinosaur lovers were not thrilled with the wildly inaccurate depictions of dinosaurs in both an anatomical sense (featherless dromaeosaurs and bizarre quadrupedal theropods) and a behavioural sense (the dinosaurs are nearly all depicted as brainless, hideous, always hungry monsters in a way that wouldn't be out of place in a 1950s b-movie).

YMMV / 65

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