adam driver | A Screenwriters Perspective: Current and Past Movies.

The new movie “65” with Adam Driver is a very bad movie with a bad title. Nothing up front is explained, other than he has to leave his daughter for 2 years even though she has some undefined medical problem and heads into space for a mission that is never fully defined. How about why is he going to space, what is his mission, and what are they trying to accomplish?. His spaceship hits an asteroid and then the remaining crew dies in cryosleep. He winds up back on planet earth 65 million years ago right at the time Earth is about to be hit by a huge life-ending asteroid. How exactly did this happen? Did they fly through a black hole or something? Another minor detail never fully explained.

Adam Driver (who took the big payday and ran) plays an astronaut named Mills who runs into a young girl named Koa, played by Ariana Greenblatt and what follows is a series of scenes with various dinosaurs and two human beings running for their lives. Unfortunately- there is not much else here and almost no story. It is always a bad sign when any movie comes out early on Thursday, trying to get some box office, before the critics trash another obvious-bad movie.

I agree with the very low 36% ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and recommend that nobody spends any money to see one of those “cookie-cutter-special-effects and no story waste of 2 hours.

While watching this too long 2 hour and 37 minute movie – I kept thinking about better titles other than “House of Gucci”. How about “House of Chain Smokers”, “House Full of Matches”, “How To Get Lung Cancer”. In all my years of going to the movies as a hobby, I have never seen more smoking in a film than this one. Not even close. Either a character was constantly smoking, or lighting up a cigarette, or grabbing for a cigarette – non stop in about 95% of every scene. My only explanation is that the producers realized that getting funding for this soap opera about the Gucci family was going to be difficult – mainly because the script was not any good. So, they lobbied every cigarette company in the world and begged them to send them money, promising non stop smoking in almost every scene in return. Smoking can kill you, in about 100 different ways, so why is the movie industry allowing this level of money over not promoting a huge human health hazard?

What is most hard to understand about this mostly bad movie is how they got Al Pacino, Lady Gaga, Jared Leto (unrecognizable in his role Paolo Gucci – with some pretty bad acting), Jeremy Irons and Adam Driver to agree to make this film, after they read the script? Then add the extremely respected Ridley Scott who directed this film. This story also commits the ultimate cardinal sin – its way too boring to keep anyone’s attention for any length of time. There are good signs that Lady Gaga can be a very good actress and some of her scenes with Adam Driver were good – but unfortunately the screenplay is just not good enough for anyone to care about the acting.

As far as I could tell, the only message within this story is that even if you are super rich and super lucky, you will still have problems. Just problems of a different proportion and different level of importance. One of the problems of being rich is that other people will be gunning for you – trying to your steal money in so many different ways. Being rich and famous can involve constantly looking over your shoulder to see who is coming around the corner.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for House of Gucci is a very low 61% for many reasons. I agree with this rating and do not recommend this film.