65

Here is the decision plainly. If big-screen battles between humans and dinosaurs are your idea of a good time, 65 delivers a handful of engaging, well-produced action sequences. It looks expensive, the dinosaurs are scary, and a few chase scenes hold your attention.

But the movie asks for extreme caution. The violence is not just intense — it's excessively bloody, with a hero pulling glass from his own stomach as blood spills everywhere and dinosaurs ripping body parts from one another. Beyond the action, there's little to hold onto: the film reveals so little about its two survivors, and undercuts even their grief, that it becomes hard to care why they're fighting at all.

So here's our answer: this one has enough merit for interested adults to catch at home, where you control the volume and the room — but it's not worth a theater trip, and it's not for your kids.

Commander Mills (Adam Driver) agrees to pilot a two-year interstellar mission for one reason: the paycheck will fund a lifesaving procedure for his sick daughter. It's the kind of sacrifice a father makes.

Shortly into the journey, an asteroid strikes his spaceship, and he crash-lands on an unfamiliar world — Earth, 65 million years ago, ruled by deadly meat-eating dinosaurs. Mills believes he's the only survivor. Then he discovers Koa, a young girl about his daughter's age, who speaks no language he knows. Together they must reach the ship's escape pod before the dinosaurs — or the falling sky — reach them.

Two stars, and here's what they mean. 65 has high production values and some compelling action scenes, and when it commits to the spectacle of a man fighting dinosaurs, it works. Those battle sequences are the film's reason to exist.

Everything around them is thinner. The movie leaves too many unanswered questions — where Mills is going, what illness his daughter has, where his family lives, what became of his wife, who is mentioned once and never again. It fails to create appealing characters, and by revealing so little about Mills and Koa, it gives you almost no reason to invest in their survival. The film can't decide whether it's horror or science fiction; it borrows from the JURASSIC PARK playbook but lacks anyone worth caring about. At 93 minutes it's short, but it never becomes inspiring.

65 lives in a world with no God in it. There's no mention of the Almighty, of Christian values, or of the Bible — just a survival story where people do what they must to stay alive. It's a pagan frame in which anything goes and no higher order is acknowledged.

Yet the film is not empty of good. Faint but real light shines through in what Mills does: he extols love, compassion, and sacrifice. He agrees to a dangerous mission to save his daughter, and when he finds Koa — a stranger, a child who can't even speak to him — he refuses to let her die. He risks his own life to keep her alive. That instinct to lay yourself down for someone who can't repay you is worth naming, even in a movie that never names its source.

The trouble is that the film undercuts its own warmth. Both children are already gone, and the story keeps deflating the family bonds it might have honored, until the sacrifice floats free of anyone to sacrifice for.

Still, the longing underneath is one Scripture answers directly. A man giving his life for a child not his own echoes the greatest love there is: "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13).

65 has the spectacle to hold an action fan's attention for 93 minutes, and a faint thread of sacrifice worth honoring. But it's too bloody, too hollow, and too scary for the whole family. So here's our answer, the same one we opened with: wait for home. Looking for movie night with the kids instead? Try our latest family-friendly picks.