65 trailer: Adam Driver shoots a dinosaur with a space gun

The trailer for 65, the new sci-fi action film from writer-director team Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, takes a minute to get to the actual premise. We get lots of shots of Adam Driver as a downed space pilot, searching a mysterious planet for survivors of a disastrous crash landing. Lots of portentous music, scary shadows, a little heartwarming “bonding with a kid” stuff.

Then, boom: Dinosaur.

So, yeah: This is a movie about Adam Driver fighting dinosaurs with space weapons. (Including a space gun and some space grenades, plus some other equipment presumably salvaged from the Aliens Memorial Space Weaponry Storage Locker.) And, hey: Why the hell not? Driver has the kind of gravitas that can lend at least a little emotional weight to pretty much any premise, no matter how dopey, and dinosaurs remain, in our personal rankings, some of the most interesting things to fire a space gun at in all of film. (Scary enough to justify killing! Lots of sizes to work with! Thick hide for warding off space ammunition, thus avoiding boring and easy kills!)

Driver co-stars in the film with Ariana Greenblatt (who co-starred in Disney series Stuck In The Middle a few years back), playing the only other survivor of a crash that apparently took place on Earth 65 million years ago. (Hence the title of the film.) It’s not clear if the pair are time travelers, or from some very human-ish civilation from the far distant past. (Maybe Adam Drivers are like crabs, and evolution throughout the galaxy trends toward producing them.) Produced by Sam Raimi, and with its writers listing surprise hit A Quiet Place on their resumés, the film is heading for a theatrical release next year, rather than the streaming fate that almost every other mid-budget action or sci-fi movie seems fated to suffer these days. 65 arrives in theaters on March 10, 2023.