I’ve been using the last couple of days of our Cornish holiday, after Andrea abandoned me for work, trying to make some progress on an essay on contemporary dystopian cinema, which is due in ten days time. I still only have the vaguest sense of what I want to say, my books are 150 miles away, and the notes I took from them in December are either uninspiring or make no real sense to me now. So I’ve switched things up and started rewatching the films to see what they say to me – and as an extra incentive to actually write things down, I thought I’d begin posting draft sections here. I have no idea which of them will make it into the final version, or in what condition.
Let’s begin with 65 (Beck and Woods 2023), Adam Driver’s addition to the humans-versus-dinosaurs canon, which still lacks a definitive film (mainly because Hammer never actually made Zeppelins vs. Pterodactyls).
‘Prior to the advent of mankind’, the opening of 65 (Beck and Woods 2023) tells us, as a disembodied viewpoint drifts through gaseous computer-generated nebulae and past bright revolving galaxies, ‘in the infinity of space other civilizations explored the heavens’.
However, having established the magnitude of space and the depths of cosmic time, the film promptly gives way to statistical absurdity: an alien spaceship returning from a long-range exploratory mission collides with the debris around the K-T asteroid and crashlands on Earth two days before the extinction-level impact will occur.
And if that is not sufficiently improbable, two survivors evade numerous dinosaurs and other perils as they locate the other half of the wreckage, which contains an undamaged escape vessel, and launch themselves back into space even as the asteroid is entering the atmosphere.
Even more absurd than this, though, is the film’s premise that on the planet Somaris, over 65 million years ago, a species evolved that is in every respect identical to middle class North American human beings. No physiological element distinguishes them from humans, and they have no distinctively alien social structure or culture. Their technology, while more advanced than our own, fits within the paradigms of contemporary design or a conventional near-future imaginary. Their emotional lives consist of an utterly familiar affective repertoire. They form monogamous nuclear families, with the gendered and generational dynamics, repressed tensions, beach holidays and comfortable-but-stylish casualwear one expects of a liberal, middle-class family. As a spaceship pilot, Mills (Adam Driver) is often away from home for up to six weeks at a time, but he nonetheless enjoys a special relationship with Nevine (Chloe Coleman), his daughter. (His wife, who is Black, is merely credited as Nevine’s Mom (Nika King)).
However, Nevine is sick with one of those never-actually-named debilitating movie diseases that, if untreated, is fatal. And since Somaris has evolved not only a species of fantastical bourgeois Americans but also a US-style healthcare system and a gig economy that now includes spaceship pilots, Mills must sign up to pilot a long-range mission that will take him away from home for two years to pay for Nevine’s expensive treatment.
In fact, the only thing that distinguishes these non-humans, with their capitalism, patriarchy and reproductive heteronomativity, from actually-existing suburban Americans, with their capitalism, patriarchy and reproductive heteronomativity, is that aliens’ holiday beach has unusual giant rock formations that look like fossilised wave crests.
If, as XXX suggests, ‘all sf falls between the poles of utopia and dystopia’ (find this fucking quote), what is one to make of such sf films as 65, which lack both hope and vision and anger and despair, and display no trace of sociopolitical world-building beyond lazily reiterating the present?
What is one to do with such a fundamentally symptomatic text that braids together elements of the dystopian world in which we live, albeit without any discernible dystopian inflection, with an extinction-level event akin to the one through which we are living, but also separating them out (bourgeois aliens live on one world, extinction descends upon another) so as to deny the causal links between, and culpability of, actually-existing socioeconomic systems and global catastrophe?
Given such blankness, such mutually cancelling contradictions that somehow sidestep the commonplace that one man’s utopia is another man’s dystopia, how can such a text be positioned between utopia and dystopia?
To treat it as utopian is to accept some Fukuyaman vision of neoliberal hegemony as not just the end of history, but the all of history; to admit that the best we can imagine is just more of the endless same.
To treat it as dystopian is to move beyond the superficial appearances that distinguish it from the polluted trashworld of, say, Blade Runner 2049 (Villeneuve 2017), and to accept the worst that we can imagine is just more of the endless same.
But 65 has no discernible interest in either of those possibilities, nor in any admixture of two.
Mark Bould 
I.e. not worth mentioning as a dystopian film.
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Not ‘as’, perhaps, but certainly ‘in the context of’
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