Adam Driver Caused The Extinction Of The Dinosaurs In 65 And I Will Never Forgive Him
This article contains spoilers for "65."
The moment "65" was finally unveiled, it aimed to fill a hole Hollywood had long overlooked — movies about dinosaurs without the title "Jurassic" in them. The first trailer was very compelling, needing only the sight of Adam Driver shooting dinosaurs with a space gun to create interest
Now that the whole film is out, it is actually rather good! The film delivers a good blend of bonkers concepts and a heartfelt story of survival. Driver carries the whole film on his back, doing his own "The Last of Us" impression of a man caring for a child in a hostile, desolate wasteland. Likewise, there are enough scenes of Driver fighting dinosaurs to be crowd-pleasing and raucous, but not so many that it becomes a direct-to-video sci-fi action movie.
The plot involves an alien interplanetary spaceship pilot hired to transport a group of people somewhere — a job he takes to earn enough money to pay to find a treatment or a cure for his daughter's unnamed illness. But when the ship crashes against an unexpected asteroid belt, he crashlands on planet Earth in the late Cretaceous period.
This is a movie that gives us the scary and dangerous dinosaurs "Jurassic Park" hasn't dared to do since the vastly underrated third film, but also one that argues, "What if Adam Driver caused the extinction of all dinosaurs?" Honestly, that is a fascinating idea, but also I can now never look at Adam Driver the same way again.
Worst pilot ever
The whole plot of "65" kick starts when, during the long trip, Adam Driver's Mills wakes up to find debris from an asteroid belt has hit his ship. Now, I'm sure the alien technology that powered that ship is quite impressive, and the internal navigation system and autopilot functioned just fine in past voyages, but if your ship breaks apart when you're asleep, it's your fault, no matter what. In the 2012 film "Flight," Denzel Washington's alcoholic airplane pilot who saves his crew after a crashland is nevertheless blamed and incarcerated for being intoxicated during the flight.
Regardless of circumstance, Mills being literally asleep at the wheel led to the death of everyone but one crewmember, and it is all his fault. So when he decides not to shoot himself but instead help the one surviving passenger get to an escape shuttle, it is literally the least he could do.
That said, "65" has even bigger things in mind than just a crashland. In what has to be one of the most ludicrous third-act reveals in a movie since it turned out "Remember Me" took place on 9/11, we discover that the debris that broke Mills' ship is but part of a much, much larger asteroid, one on an imminent collision course with Earth.
Yes, that asteroid.
In a way, by being asleep and crashing with part of that asteroid, Mills arguably set in motion a chain of events that led to the meteor that killed the vast majority of the plants and animals on the planet, ending the age of dinosaurs.
Sully wouldn't have let this happen
By the end of the film, Driver and Ariana Greenblatt's Koa escape the planet, and we see the meteor hit the ground. Though the scene is more preoccupied with the triumphant escape from Mills and Koa than the creatures on the ground, they did doom an entire planet to die. Moreover, given how effective Mills' single gun was at dealing with giant dinosaurs, it is hard to believe there was nothing on their ship that could have broken the meteor into smaller chunks or something.
To be fair, the dinosaurs don't make it easy to feel bad for them. In the cruelest scene in the film, Koa runs to save a baby dinosaur trapped in tar, only to see a group of oviraptors rip it to shreds. This is no "Jurassic Park" where you feel bad for the man-eating dinosaurs and want them to be safe from the evil humans, but a movie where you cheer as Adam Driver shoots a giant theropod in the face or as Koa blows up a dinosaur just trying to get some food.
Granted, there is the question of whether or not Mills' ship even affected the trajectory of the asteroid at all. But you know what, even if he didn't have anything to do with it, it still falls on him as a pilot. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger would never allow his ship to be torn in half by flying rocks, or a massive rock to destroy the earth — unless it was only inhabited by birds, of course.
"65" is a thrilling sci-fi movie that offers something unique. But to have the movie pin the extinction of all dinosaurs on one man is too much. I'm sorry, Adam Driver, but it is all your fault.