65; the future is capitalism, and so is the past

 I don't have much to say about 65 as a movie; it stands on its own as proof that there are things that not even Adam Driver can save. There are dinosaurs. There are dinosaur killing asteroids. There is Adam Driver apparently using his USMC firearms training for the first time on screen. These is the numb gratitude that it's all over in 93 minutes, even if it feels like more.

No, I have come here after a year and a half of keeping my thoughts to myself about more than 65 better movies solely to bitch about the politics.

The whole point of 65 is that it's happening way in the past, but that human looking people are roaming the stars banging into our own little sky pebble long before we even existed ourselves. So that we can thrill to watching them getting nearly schwacked by dinosaurs, which is way less thrilling in practice than it must have seemed in the elevator pitch. 

But before we get to that, the scene is set in the most dispiriting way possible; Adam Driver's character is living in a society which can fly from one star to another as matter of routine, but he's forced to take on a long haul flight so that he can get the money to pay for his daughter to be cured of a treatable wasting disease. Just let that sink in; the cure exists, and the society is one which has figured out try star flight, which requires the kind of energy theory that makes money almost obsolete, yet instead of the community just saving her life, he has to do a dangerous job just to pay for it. And it's presented in those terms, he gets paid more than average so that he can directly pay for treatment.

Yup, corporate America is spelling it out for you; going bankrupt in an effort to save your life is just the way things are, in all time and on all planets. It's the way things have to be.

But just in case you miss the message that modern America is the only way a future society can ever be, as soon as Adam crashes into a completely unknown world, the first thing that he does is to find himself a machine gun so that he can shoot whatever he meets.

Science Fiction is supposed to show us that other things are possible.