65

 65 million years ago, as an odd opening crawl explains, aliens who looked and behaved exactly like us were already buzzing around our galaxy. We meet one of them, Mills (Adam Driver), having a beach day with his wife and daughter. He's taking on a long contract to ferry other people across the stars because it offers triple his normal salary - and he needs the money to get treatment for his daughter.

 This advanced star-faring race hasn't evolved beyond our shitty version of capitalism, in other words. They don't have even have proper healthcare. It's a staggering failure of imagination; I'm used to sci-fi movies wiping their ass with the science part, but this movie all but boldly announces that the people who wrote this did not give a quantum of a fuck about either its science or its fiction in the first five minutes.

 That is, sadly, borne out by the rest of the movie, a deeply, mind-numbingly mediocre mid-budget survival thriller that pits Mills against dinosaurs when his ship crash-lands on Earth at the end of the Jurassic... a few days before a rain of asteroids comes to cause a mass extinction event.

 The only other survivor in the crash is a nine-year-old girl (Ariana Greenblatt) who Mills finds at the start of his journey. Together they must travel fifteen kilometers of primeval forests (which look just like regular forests) while doing some mild bonding and dodging somewhat regular dinosaur attacks and other perils.

 The action and suspense are lackluster, the emotional beats are all dead on arrival, and the dinosaur designs are boring. The main antagonists look more like Komodo dragons than any dinosaur I know of, but at least they move in an interesting, sinuous way - all the other species portrayed here kind of suck, and forego all the wild stuff paleontologists have been theorizing about for the last fifty years in favour of the familiar. Driver and Greenblatt do what they can, but honestly, their characters are so lifeless, their arcs so flat, they might as well have been wooden dummies.

Directors Bryan Woods and Scott beck sometimes do seem to try to find a cinematic angle for things, but their action chops are nonexistent and, except for a fairly cool introduction to a T-Rex, they don't manage a single memorable scene or sequence. At least their visuals are fit for purpose, which is a lot more than what you can say for their script

 Holy shit, this script. How did this ever get picked up? There's not a single element that works. The characters are terrible, the worldbuilding is painfully bad, it has nothing but contempt for plausibility or scientific rigour. There are no clever ideas or twists to be found anywhere, nor any emotion elicited by the film's frequently maudlin character moments.

 It just doesn't work at a deeply fundamental level. Right down to the premise: "Space human from before earth humans falls to earth with a ship full other humans in stasis." You can imagine that the film would set up them to somehow be our predecessors, right? (An idea that was already old when Douglas Adams took the piss out of it in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but don't you mind).
 Well, nope, that's explicitly not the case. The whole premise of the movie doesn't just stretch suspension of disbelief beyond breaking point, it has no reason to be there in the first place. Pointless set dressing for a lackluster action yarn. And don't get me started on the logistics of space travel in this movie.

 I have no idea how Sony manages to dump poorly written turds like this on theaters over and over and over again. No other distributor has as bad a track record as they do, so little quality control. It's... some kind of amazing. And shame on Beck & Woods - I am now retroactively much less tolerant of the many flaws of The Quiet Place thanks to this shitshow.