92 min | PG-13 | March 10, 2023 | Columbia Pictures
Sixty-five million years ago, a pilot crash-lands on an unknown planet that turns out to be prehistoric Earth. Adam Driver fights dinosaurs with a laser rifle and a terrified kid in tow. The pitch is the whole movie, and the movie knows it.
Mills is a space pilot who takes a long-haul mission to fund his sick daughter’s care. An asteroid field tears his ship apart and dumps him on a hostile world. The world is Earth, sixty-five million years before humans, which means the local wildlife wants to eat him. He has one other survivor, a girl named Koa who speaks no language he understands, and a long walk to the escape pod. The film treats its premise as a complete idea rather than a starting point. Adam Driver versus dinosaurs is the elevator pitch, and the script never builds a second floor.
Adam Driver plays Mills as a man running on grief and protocol. He sells the survival mechanics with full commitment and gives the silences more weight than the dialogue earns. Ariana Greenblatt plays Koa, a child stranded with a stranger and no shared words. The language barrier is the film’s one genuinely good idea, and the two actors mine it for real tension before the script reduces them to surrogate father and daughter. Greenblatt holds her own opposite Driver, but neither character gets written past a single trait.
Scott Beck and Bryan Woods write and direct, and they shoot the planet as a wet, fungal murk of fog and rain. The cinematography keeps the dinosaurs half-hidden in low light, which hides the budget and drains the menace at the same time. The creatures register as snapping shapes in the dark rather than animals with mass or behavior. The editing cuts the action so close that geography dissolves, and the score pushes hard to manufacture stakes the staging fails to deliver. Beck and Woods stage competent set pieces and forget to populate the space between them.
This is a survival film that confuses a logline for a story. The premise promises pulp spectacle and the execution delivers a grim, gray slog through generic peril. Mills and Koa walk, run, hide, and repeat, and the film mistakes motion for momentum. There is a lean B-movie buried in here that leans into its own absurdity. This one plays it straight and bleeds out the fun.