
AKA Sixty-Five Million Years Ago A visitor Crashlanded On Earth.
I understand why they settled for the shorter title now! Though the runtime's not long enough. Gotta give a concept like this a proper runtime. And time to build initially, at least.
It has a melodysheep level intro, holy shit... that's the highlight of the movie. The vast expanse of space where all glow and sparkles, and the planet seen in detail like never before...
Reminds me a bit of Dune too. Similar sense of escapism, albeit a bit less luxurious and barren a foreign world there...
It almost feels like we have a need for new worlds these days. Empty space. Voids to colonize, to escape our race... where everything just gets shittier and shitter. Big cinema trend these days. Though they never portray the future - or the alien - as an entirely good thing. It's like we subconsciously yearn for our demise too. I wonder what these trends really mean.
Envisioning a future - good or no - is fun though. Nothing's off limits to the imagination - though such things considered you'd think they could have taken the concepts here even further - though the tech's futuristic it's not unrecognizable. Like is that a ferrofluid bedside table tablet?
The ship looks good. The planet looks good. The progression's realistic... though the cute little dinos getting crushed whilst whimsically running after their prey, and the big ones getting stabbed in the eye by a little girl (Ariana Greenblatt - she's not so little after all huh!)... they could've conveyed the threats better.
I like the plot, but it feels like they left out some key details. Beginning and end. And the moments on Earth were... isolated.
Wasn't the dinosaur world a thriving one?
It's strange, seeing their occasional encounters more in the light of horror than thriller. I appreciate the harshness coming across occasionally - like with that little cub they dragged out of the muck - but if they wanted harshness they could've taken it way further too.
It's less a world of wonder than that other big dinosaur franchise - and I'm glad - they did something different, but it feels oddly one-sided and inauthentic, even if the CGI's great. Adam Driver's tendency to keep spraining or dislocating something gets a little annoying too. And in the end his wound has little impact on the progression.
I don't know... I want to love this, but it didn't go all the way like it could've. Not with the future, not with the past, not with a lot of things. It reminds me a bit of After Earth - that movie with Will Smith and his son. It was similarly good-looking - and similar - but just didn't carry all the way.
I wouldn't say any cast's too little to make a good film - it's always impressing when they manage a movie with but a few - but... something's lacking. It feels less impactful than it could have. More visual than raw.
Didn't realize at first at exactly what point in our history as a species 65,000,000 years was btw! The dinosaur part I knew, but the asteroids?
I SHOULD have known...
Anyway the movie overall? Great concept. Mediocre execution.
rated 3.5/5: not bad at all