65 Million Reasons

We watched the worst-named movie of the current century: 65 (2023).

We meet Adam Driver on a beach on some strange world (actually not particularly strange). He is discussing his upcoming exploratory space trip. He doesn't want to leave his sick daughter, but his wife insists that they need the money to pay for her treatment. We can tell that they are members of an alien species because they stitching on their normal clothes is a little funny, and they have strange customs regarding money and medical treatment. 

A while into his flight, an asteroid knocks the spaceship off course. It breaks in half in the atmosphere of a planet that a text crawl informs us is Earth, 65 million years ago. His part of the ship includes a stasis capsule with a young girl (Arianna Greenblatt). The other part, 17 km away, includes the other passengers and a functioning escape pod. 

So he and the girl start the (not that long) trek to the other half, atop a mountain. On the way, they encounter prehistoric fauna (big bugs and smallish dinosaurs), normal looking forests, and the usual prehistoric problems - tar pits. Although Driver and Greenblatt can't speak the same language (they come from the same planet, but different regions), they bond. She needs him to help find her parents (they are definitely dead) and she reminds him of his sick daughter (who is also dead - the treatment didn't go well). 

To top it all off - that asteroid? It's the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. 

The actiony stuff, all the dinosaurs and so on, was surprisingly weak for a modern blockbuster wannabe. I thought Hollywood had that nailed down. The idea that the characters were supposed to be aliens was very tenuous - couldn't they have had forehead ridges like Star Trek aliens? Or technology that didn't look like it came from 2001? But the father/surrogate daughter dynamic worked surprisingly well. It made the movie very watchable for us. I note here that Quantumania was also based on that dynamic. I must say I prefer it to the daddy issues plots that are so common.