65
Planet of the Apes meets After Earth. This follows all modern trends to a T, but it works. The kid is actually great, and Adam Driver is a good at being befuddled the whole film.
The modern trends bit is extremely on the nose:
- Older guy escorts little girl through the real bad world out there as penance for losing his own daughter? Check.
- Such minimalist script, the leads don’t even talk the same language? Check.
- Freaking American healthcare system in the jetpack future? Check.
- “Ethnic Woodwinds” credited as music instrument? Check.
The suspense of the title is not left to the imagination, it is included with a kind of pointless second credits. There was no need to dumb this down, if you sell is as the dinosaur film in the advertising.
Anyway, the plot is simple: Adam Driver is a space bus driver (Paterson IN SPACE!) which hits space weather and crash lands into Earth 65 million years ago, most precisely in the Chicxulub impact site. It appears all died except our hero. As he was about to make himself dead too, he finds the kid he will carry to safety. They don’t speak the language, so he tricks her, saying her family is on the escape pod, even tough they are dead.
After some slapstick comedy, several intense and claustrophobic action sequences, and some light horror scenes, they reach the escape pod, just in time to be attacked by 3 T-Rex analogues. It seems our hero is being setup for a sacrifice, but she saves him in the end, and they escape in the nick of time.
Formally, this has all ingredients for being a modern hipster mess. The minimalism saves it.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.