It's not that Adam Driver doesn't seem interested in commercial fare (he was one of the main actors in the Disney-era Star Wars trilogy, after all). He's just so distinctive (read; weird) looking he kind of jars in any role that doesn't call for his gangly gait, long hair or some sort of embellishment of his form. When he just appears as a regular guy with short hair and everyday clothes, like he did in films like The Report, it only brings his off-kilter look into sharper focus.

Anyway, this seems to one another of those movies some studio rushed into production because the post-COVID pipelines that would normally be full of superhero sequels were still a bit lean – the co-directors (who I'd never heard of) were probably jumping for joy, never expecting a global-scale theatrical release.

It's a videogame of a movie, one action set piece after another with a ticking clock in the background and about as much human backstory as you get in mid-tier mainstream entertainment.

We meet the hero, Mills (Adam Driver), who lives on a distant planet with curiously human customs, let alone English, talking with his wife about an extended work trip that will take him away from their beloved and sick daughter but pay for the surgery that will make her well.

Some time later Mills is on his mission and returning home when the ship is caught in an asteroid field which causes catastrophic damage and brings the ship down on a nearby planet.

As is revealed in the title card, Mills has actually crash landed on Earth back in the dinosaur era, 65 million years ago. He sifts through the wreckage to find the colonists he was transporting dead, realises the ship is torn in half and prepares himself to give up – especially with nasty creatures lurking nearby in the shadows.

But he finds a single survivor, a young teenage girl named Koa, and realises the distress beacon and escape pod is on the other half of the ship across a wide valley.

Despite he and Koa not speaking the same language, he convinces her to accompany him by telling her she'll find her parents there – even though he's already IDed their bodies – so the pair can return home.

I recently watched Prey, which was a neat little action thriller from the Predator universe that has a stripped back, no-nonsense, of-itself feel you rarely see in a standalone movie nowadays and although the reviews of this flick have been negative I got the exact same sense.

They wrote a script where Adam Driver has to run through a jungle fighting dinosaurs with a laser gun. How can you get that wrong, one review asked. The answer? It's almost impossible in a $100m movie – if you find something wrong with the pacing, staging, VFX or dialogue here you're expecting way too much.

It's good fun, it has some effective creepy scenes, a sense of propulsive movement, and if you don't think about the contrivances so much (where did the people of this ancient world come from if humans evolved on Earth after the dinosaurs were gone?), it's as good and unchallenging time as you can expect in a theatre.