Science Fiction

Spoilers follow…

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I watched it on a plane, so I won’t comment on it as a spectacle, but it’s an odd, very small movie. It’s basically using sci-fi (and NOT time travel, oddly enough) as set dressing to tell an intimate story (four speaking parts not including the computer) about grief and connection, as well as letting Adam Driver do a cut-rate Revenant imitation.

The acting is solid (I’m no John Oliver, but I’ve never seen Driver turn in a a bad performance), and Greenblatt does really, really well with a limited part, stealing several scenes, to the extent you can do when only sharing it with one other actor.

Then, the storytelling is lean, but almost to a fault. There’s just not a lot of there there, and in particular there’s nothing about the story that has to be sci-fi. It’s not mindless like the latest JP entries, but it’s not really a dinosaur movie either.

It’s a sweet little meditation that also happens to involve blowing up a velociraptor with half a dozen thermal detonators.

I will give it credit for being the first time I’ve needed to type the phrase, “Checkov’s poison-berry dinosaur bone.”