This year’s batch of Super Bowl trailers included a short new teaser for 65, a prehistoric sci-fi film starring Adam Driver and Ariana Greenblatt. Though not as long as its official trailers, the TV spot did share more exciting shots of the upcoming film.
Written and directed by Scott Beck and Byran Woods, Sony's 65 follows Driver's Mills, a pilot of a spacecraft that crash-lands on Earth in prehistoric times. He and Koa - the only other survivor of the crash and played by Greenblatt - must traverse the dinosaur-ridden terrain and use their wits and technology to figure out a means of escape.
While not revealing much more than the official 65 trailer, the TV spot continues to emphasize the tension and excitement of the film. Quick shots of Driver and Greenblatt racing through jungles, eerie landscape shots that make the planet the audience knows feel alien and strange, and shots of dinosaurs roaming the land are smashed together in quick succession. The result is a thrilling - albeit short - look at the world of the film.
The official 65 trailer gives a more in-depth look at the world and the sci-fi elements of the story. Both trailers include images of Mills' gun - which seems to be a take on plasma guns - and Mills' space suit. While the interior and exterior of the ship are seen in both trailers, the official trailer shows more of the crash landing that kicks off the film’s events. The ship collides with what looks like meteors in space as Mills straps in and prepares for impact, and the faces of the ship's passengers, whom the audience will presumably never meet, flash on a small screen. As the ship careens closer and closer to the Earth’s surface, it loses parts of itself. What those parts are is unclear, but their loss could be part of what stops Mills and Koa from immediately escaping.
Though this is their largest-scale project to date, the writing and directing team Beck and Woods are no strangers to the sci-fi genre. The two wrote A Quiet Place, a sci-fi horror film released in 2018 and directed by John Krasinski. Krasinski also starred alongside Emily Blunt, Millicent Simmons, and Noah Jupe. While their stories are different - A Quiet Place taking place in a near-future, post-apocalyptic world and 65 taking place sixty-five million years ago - both films seem to share a reverence for classic sci-fi films. The aliens' design in A Quiet Place is similar to the xenomorph in the Alien films - hulking, dark, and frighteningly fast.
While much is still unknown about the specifics of 65, it’s easy to draw similarities between the film and the J urassic Park franchise. 65 has inverted the question posed by Jurassic Park - “What would happen if dinosaurs existed in the modern world?” - and asks, “What if humans existed in the pre-historic world?” The answer to both questions seems to be that humans will always be in mortal danger, no matter how technologically advanced they are.
65 will be released exclusively in theaters on March 10th, 2023.
Source: Sony/YouTube