65’s twist makes Adam Driver’s dinosaur fight film even wilder

Is a twist a twist if it spins properly in the first five minutes of a movie? According to Sony Pictures yes – hence marketing for 65 stressed the part about Adam Driver fighting dinosaurs on a prehistoric planet Earth, rather than answering the question of how he got there in the first place. But the truth made me absolutely dizzy.

“Following a catastrophic crash on an unknown planet,” reads Sony’s carefully crafted plot description 65“Pilot Mills (Adam Driver) quickly discovers that he was indeed stranded on Earth… 65 million years ago.”

But here’s the thing: Mills doesn’t discover that he 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 65; The pilot’s crash was simply an industrial accident during a routine ship mission across the galaxy coordinated by beings from another planet. The driver is not “human” – he is an alien!

Of course, according to writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, finding an organic way back to the time of the dinosaurs was a difficult proposition, and even more so when they came up with the idea that Mills came to Earth from a completely different civilization would come.

“We needed it to feel grounded,” says Beck of the challenge. “There were wild ideas that stayed on the page, like Adam speaking a different language or different face modifications [to make him look more alien]. But we had to find a mix where we didn’t lose the audience in the first five minutes. We always did pressure tests.”

The duo spent a good chunk of pre-production on it 65 Explore world-building options with production designer Kevin Ishioka. Questions ranged from basic — Has this civilization embraced digital technology or does it rely on analog? – to the fantastic. At one point, Beck and Woods contemplated a design for Mills’ galactic freighter that would have been built entirely of stone, unlike anything the average moviegoer would immediately recognize as a spaceship.

“We’ve talked a lot about the technology in the film having to be futuristic at times – more advanced than our technology – and backward at times,” says Woods. “We wanted to draw that line between futurism and retro, a mix of antiquity and future. That was the benchmark for us.”

Image: SonyPictures

The film’s opening scenes, set on an alien beach dotted with spiraling vertical rock formations, give us only hints of a larger world constructed in the far reaches of space. The focus is more on Mills’ soul-searching: the only reason he took his shipping job was to earn enough money for a drug that might or might not save his terminally ill daughter. When everything goes wrong (thanks to an untimely chunk of space rock sending his ship spiraling toward Earth, a precursor to a much larger meteor heading for the planet), Mill’s struggle for survival is immediately pressured by the need to get home to his child and to protect another survivor, a young girl named Koa (Ariana Greenblatt), also stranded in the Cretaceous.

“We try to show more than we explain,” Driver tells Polygon, “but you know what the relationship means to him because he’s not willing to talk when he’s faced with someone who remembers him in every detail remembers the past.”

Mills is not a conventional hero. While Jurassic Park emerges as an obvious sci-fi touchstone for the film, Driver Mills compares it to Harry Dean Stanton in extraterrestrial. He’s just a worker punching a time clock. “You could almost compare it to a truck driver. It’s not a planet where being a pilot is alien to them. There is no kind of hierarchical thing [because he’s an alien]. That’s what he does.”

While 65 gets muddy, Beck and Woods also cite extraterrestrial as a way to ground the potentially far-fetched setup into something real. While creating a new planet and shaping a world where aliens like Mills ship cryogenically frozen humans as cargo, they eventually bring him to a familiar planet where he confronts creatures the audience already knows a lot about. That meant respecting known science about dinosaurs while delving into science fiction.

“We had one Venn diagram with one circle all about science,” says Woods, “and then in the other Venn diagram circle we had Ridley Scott’s extraterrestrial, one of the scariest movies of all time. And so we just wanted to combine interesting science and something scary.”