The only thing I knew about this film was that it starred Kylo Ren & Dinosaurs, and that he was trying to get somewhere to do something, and had a kid in tow.
First thoughts about the premise was that this was some kind of time travel film, given that Adam is playing a very modern-day human and he's speaking English. No so
Turns out he's actually what we'd consider an alien from another planet 65 million years ago, who looks exactly like what we look like now, and also speaks English, and has a pretty western name - Mills. But then, Luke Skywalker had a pretty Earth-bound name and actually spoke Auebesh, which sounds exactly like English, which was lucky otherwise no-one would have understood what the hell was going on
Anyways, the plot is pretty simple. Adam plays an interstellar pilot who takes on a 2-year mission to fly a bunch of human icicles across the cosmos, leaving his wife & poorly daughter behind. His reasoning being that the high paypacket can pay for her treatment. Healthcare systems in other galaxies seem to suck as well. Wait until they find out nothing changes in 65 million years
On the way to the destination, the ship runs into an unchartered asteroid field. THE Asteroid field, subtly enacting a ticking clock trope as the ship crash-lands on the virgin earth, tearing apart on impact and casting the cryo-pods asunder. After getting his bearings and discovering he's actually not the only survivor in the shape of Koa, a 9-year old girl who miraculously survived the imapct, so begins the quest to get to the other half of the ship that houses an escape pod that can launch them off the planet. It's just that it's halfway up a mountain and all these pesky dinosaurs keep getting in the way
For a film that's barely an hour and a half long, it feels slightly longer, but not in a bad way. It fills the run time well and tells the story it needs to. There's enough factual errors to fill a full IMDB goofs section, but who cares when it's this entertaining.
A solid 8/10, driven (no pun intended) by the performances of the smallest cast list I've seen on a movie - ever.
An interesting afterthough:
It's niggling that Adam & Koa are so very clearly human, they even bleed red, but what are the chances that the planet they crash on would eventually harbor life in their exact form?
SPOILER:
It could be suggested that those who didn't survive the crash decomposed on the planet after the asteroid hit, and their DNA hung around in a micro-biological form in enough numbers to seed the first elements of post-dinosaur life?
Food for thought
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Writer`s Release
