Beck and Woods hand Adam Driver a rifle and a prehistoric forest and then ask him to grieve in it for ninety minutes. The dinosaurs are decent when they turn up; the film in between them is glum, thin and short of ideas.
Mills (Adam Driver) is a pilot from a planet that is not ours, partway through a long-haul run when his ship hits a field of rock and comes apart. He wakes in a forest he does not recognise, which the title has already told us is Earth, 65 million years ago, with the asteroid on its way. The only other survivor is Koa (Ariana Greenblatt), a child who does not speak his language. What follows is the two of them walking to the half of the ship that landed on a mountain, with dinosaurs in between. Scott Beck and Bryan Woods wrote and directed it, it runs 92 minutes, and it is a perfectly good idea for a Saturday night that has been made as though it were about grief.
Driver takes it seriously, which is the film’s best asset and, in the end, part of its trouble. He plays Mills as a tired, careful man who talks to himself because there is nobody else, and when he shouts at a dinosaur he shouts as if he means it. Greenblatt is handed a language nobody in the audience speaks and finds a way to be funny in it, mostly by looking at Driver as if he were the strange one. The two of them working out a word or two with drawings in the dirt is the closest the film comes to a scene rather than a set piece.
The dinosaurs are decent, and better in the dark. Salvatore Totino lights the forest as a grey-green murk with torch beams cutting across it, and the best sequence has Mills and Koa in a cave with something large breathing at the far end of it. There the film holds a shot, lets the sound do the work and earns a proper jolt. Kevin Ishioka’s ship is a good piece of design too: a long cracked shell of pale panels half-buried in mud, more like a stranded whale than a rocket. Michael Kaplan puts Driver in a grey flight suit that gets browner as the film goes on, which is about the only thing in it that changes.
The trouble is everything between the scares. Beck and Woods have one beat and they play it every ten minutes: a rustle, a pause, a creature, a rifle, a run, a quiet moment about the daughter Mills left at home. Jane Tones and Josh Schaeffer cut each of these to the same length and the same rhythm, and Chris Bacon’s score tells us each time that it is sad, then that it is frightening, then that it is sad again. We were bored by the forty-minute mark, and then annoyed at being bored, because a man with an energy rifle on a planet full of dinosaurs is not a hard thing to keep interesting. The film keeps stopping to be solemn, and it has not written anything solemn enough to justify the stops.
Beck and Woods wrote A Quiet Place (2018), which took a single rule and built a whole tense film on it. Here the rule is looser, the world is thinner, and the daylight sequences show how little of the planet has been imagined beyond the next stand of trees. Sam Raimi is a producer, and his name promises a rougher, funnier film than this one. The B-pictures 65 descends from knew that when the premise is a man against the Cretaceous, the correct tone is glee. This one thinks it is a bereavement drama with teeth.
Most critics have landed about where we have, unmoved but not offended, and we do not think they are wrong. The 12A is fairly earned; the cave will frighten a ten-year-old and nothing here will scar one. See it if a lean creature feature is the evening you want and you can forgive it for not enjoying itself. It is over quickly, and that is the kindest thing we can say about it.
