Annihilation (2018) -- Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Oscar Isaac, Tessa Thompson, dir. Alex Garland, based on Jeff VanderMeer's book

I think the other two books had not come out when he wrote the script, but he said he didn't even re-read the first one. Seemed promising st the time but a bad idea in retrospect.

the second book was released three months later...

he's doing a tech thriller t.v. show:

http://deadline.com/2018/03/fx-devs-pilot-ex-machina-alex-garland-scott-rudin-1202336940/

the second book was released three months later...

...

this was barely b-level i thought, which is fine as long as there's some kind of rollicking good times but it was so dreary

"hey, why so mopey? what's your name? i'm a straight-shootin wisecrackin scientist! come over and meet my buddies. yep, all of us will be dead soon, it's that kind of movie. get to know us!"

the exact moment when i knew this would be unfun was when they walk right through the pearlescent soap-bubble shimmer without even pausing

i mean.. surely as the director you think - hey. this is a big moment. maybe a moment of no return. they're about to enter the most inexplicable zone ever encountered by the human race. maybe they... pause? reach out a hand to touch it? maybe we even get a... close-up?? a reaction shot? no they just blorp right through, doesn't even slow em down, out of our way, we're here on a fact-finding mission! to find out about... stuff! (like this iridescent bubble??)

agreed w/all the above about lost opportunities to truly unsettle. doesn't even need special effects, just some playing around with film grammar, the way janet pops into existence in the good place.

felt extremely Homecoming in places (for fans of the Gimlet podcast..)

And Portman remains the death touch for every. single. thing. I've seen her in. It's as if an entire generation of filmgoers/makers is unable to process that someone attractive and intelligent could have zero charisma and no affect.

agreed. She’s the Claire Danes of actresses.

could not disagree with Tracer more strongly about the bubble, that was one of my favorite things in the film. no corny-ass moment where trained scientists suddenly become wonder-struck children letting the camera dawdle over their wide-eyed awe. they walk in. they have a job to do. in the movies, characters sort of are always reminding the viewer "if this was you, you'd be totally blown away by these circumstances." i like a movie that lets people with do their work the way people do their work: without calling massive attention to their own reactions.

isn't their job to be at least a little bit curious about the bubble?

and even if your answer is no i just thought it was a real missed opportunity. fine, if you think they ought to be uninterested (for whatever reason). i don't but let's grant that. so in that case let's SEE that. set us up for a moment of wonder and then show them grunting impatiently through it. that imparts information, tells us something about them. they're so dim in the rest of the film that this moment didn't read like they were badass prioritizers it read like bovine incuriosity

did it occur to anyone else that a way around the comms blackout might have been two dixie cups and a very long piece of string

there are plenty of attempted "moments of wonder" in this btw - the deer, the flowers, the legs sticking out of a DNA fresco in the drained swimming pool, the writhing snakes in the belly - none of which was anything more than super obvs 5 seconds after hitting the screen so maybe it's for the best that they didn't try for one here

i could certainly have handled a little less of portman calling massive attention to her own (pained, self-serious) reactions to every single goddamn thing

Idk if “moments of wonder” was the goal of the movie at any point? Deer, topiary, bear, guts, crocodile, flowers, etc., were all about the adventurers’ perception of the alien in the familiar/familiar in the alien.

i always find it so weird in stories like this, where nobody's ever come back from the mysterious portal, that they keep sending in teams with all kinds of equipment, outfitted for weeks of survival and so on, your mission is to reach the lighthouse blah blah. i'd be like, your mission is to get the fuck back out and tell us what's going on. in this one there's at least the possibility that they would try to do that but they got screwed up by that initial loss of time and the scrambled instruments so all they can do is try and make it to the shore. weird that they don't bring in like, a hot air balloon. or a little baby helicopter like james bond. or try to climb a tree. i could not figure out why they didn't climb a tree. file that under "the four of us have to defend this gigantic sprawling base that's already been breached - better split up and have some people keep watch down on the ground!"

tbh i may have just wanted a more faithful adaptation of fantastic four #293-295, in which Central City is swallowed by a gradually expanding black time bubble.

http://www.supermegamonkey.net/chronocomic/entries/scans15/FF293_IronMan.jpg

http://www.supermegamonkey.net/chronocomic/entries/scans15/FF293_SheHulk.jpg

i didn't need a scene of wonder at the shimmer's edge. but it'd be cool to maybe get a little more of a sense of what it feels to touch it, to push through it.... i guess it was kinda interesting/different that it presents no resistance at all but you just lose a ton of short-term memory so we don't see any of that part of their journey. i guess it'd be hard to actually show everything happen and then depict them not remembering the scenes we just saw. but in a way that might be more interestingly weird than just showing them becoming unhinged and tying each other up all of a sudden.

Send a drone into the shimmer, at the very least put a phone on a telescoping rod and take a pic?

IIRC the shimmer is totally impenetrable except for one little entryway

Good entry point for the drone ime

The sound is such a major part of this movie. It is a serious cinematic crime that a lot of folks are forced to see this first on Netflix.

Also didn’t realize that so many people have such an allergy to Portman. I guess people take her lack of “warmth” for woodenness or something but I think she’s usually fine and was fine in this.

brb installing a full dolby atmos setup in everyone's home

visually portman reminded me of, and bear with me on this one... owen wilson??

something about her rawboned, squinty look i guess

o_O

i know

i was like.. what is it, what is it and when it hit me i was like wow okay

Good entry point for the drone ime

they established that technology doesn't work in the zone, jeez

poor obama

Pinhole camera on a selfie stick

How about just tie a rope to somebody who goes in and pull them out?

Maybe felt it was a good opportunity to get rid of Natalie Portman?

i think it's an interesting choice to make the team all scientists, could be cool, but they don't really act like any scientists i've ever met most of the time, so that felt like window-dressing. idk i think there's a reason things in this genre often have some non-scientists on the team to force the story to go a certain route and get you past any "real scientists would not behave like this" - well they want to sit around and discuss how you would begin to set this up as a study but there's this army person who's tired of all this mumbo-jumbo and wants to remind them they're on a mission. JJL is playing that role here i guess but not strongly enough to get me away from the "wait, why would they do that?" problems. arrival felt much more like it was about people who think about complex and unsolvable problems for a living, and was really interested in the Big Questions that at some distant remove motivate the fields the characters work in. sure it wasn't AS smart about science as it could have been but idk it's just like, if they're gonna be scientists, have that inform who they are and how they act.

thinking about some of the characters in the mars trilogy, how e.g. the geologist has really strong opinions about martian rocks that extend ultimately into an ethical-political question about the future of mars and whether humans have the right to fuck with this martian rock ecology that's been doing its own thing for millions of years. if what the movie has its mind on is people being confronted with a more mutable, fluid world than the stable one they're used to, then idk, make that a thing. so is the idea that portman makes it to the end because she gives lectures about cancer and is therefore more used to the idea of life being full of things growing and developing in a way that seems harmful from one POV but is kinda just what life does? idk there are the seeds of some strong ideas here but the script is just sooooo dumb that none of it really felt under control to me. glad others are liking it though!

JJL’s character was still a psychologist in the film I thought?

yea she was

the underrated science

right hence my "i guess." she was also the commanding officer of the mission so she did some of the "we're on a mission here, people, enough pontificating let's move on" work even though she was notionally also a scientist. they basically barely did any science stuff beyond coming to abrupt conclusions about the nature of the world inside the shimmer. it's b-movie stuff and fine as far as that goes but idk if i'm gonna get this level of dialogue filling it out, i'd rather be watching deep blue sea.

their mission was to make observations, but ultimately do so once they got to the epicenter at the lighthouse

this was basically crap wasn't it? so glad I didn't have to spend money at the cinema to watch what was p much an extended Stranger Things episode with all the charm and fun removed

I feel like I've encountered this premise so many times recently, the idea of an underworld or a flipside or an area that's been taken over by a mysterious entity. Silent Hill, the OA, Stranger Things and of course things like Stalker or Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake trilogy.. it didn't feel like it was doing anything these hadn't already done and the characters were all so dull, with some lousy acting and heaps of exposition. the odd cool bit mitigated it but there weren't enough of those cool bits (screaming pig monster;the mimic etc)

The ending saved it for me, otherwise I'd be inclined to agree with dl

as much as I'm kvetching abt this movie's mediocrity, the mimic really was super unsettling and a very inspired design. great scene. marred only by how forced it is that they're all tied up and helpless. and how does natalie portman know that the trick is to not react? is she just thinking of jurassic park? whatever the weird skull face was great.

I think in the book there was a creature out in the night who had the voice of one of the previous expedition's members, that could have been good. Also it was more an eerie recurrence than actually attacking them, but whatever.

the Expanse also does a riff on this - a superweapon that's essentially an evolutionary mutation machine on fast-forward

Next they perceived all around them an infinite number of beasts, lean, panting, with bristling claws, and mingled together one above another in a mysterious and terrifying confusion. There were serpents with feet, and bulls with wings, fishes with human heads were devouring fruit, flowers were blooming in the jaws of crocodiles, and elephants with uplifted trunks were sailing proudly through the azure like eagles. Their incomplete or multiplied limbs were distended with terrible exertion. As they thrust out their tongues they looked as though they would fain give forth their souls; and every shape was to be found among them as if the germ-receptacle had been suddenly hatched and had burst, emptying itself upon the walls of the hall.

from Salammbo, Gustave Flaubert, 1862.

read by me here
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/eli-reads/id1345096977?mt=2

(this chapter the above passage comes from goes up Wednesday)

But beyond it seemed as though there were a cloud wherein were twinkling stars; faces appeared in the depths of its folds—Eschmoun with the Kabiri, some of the monsters that had already been seen, the sacred beasts of the Babylonians, and others with which they were not acquainted. It passed beneath the idol’s face like a mantle, and spread fully out was drawn up on the wall to which it was fastened by the corners, appearing at once bluish as the night, yellow as the dawn, purple as the sun, multitudinous, diaphanous, sparkling light.

they should’ve used the plot from the book imo, instead of turning it into Jurassic park. pretty good movie tho

also, it’s not much like Stalker, at all?? i cant think of any similarities beyond ‘people exploring The Zone’...

there's trees. and pained expressions.

it’s a small group exploring an area that’s changed in some way that can’t be easily scientifically addressed and the real thing they end up confronting is their own motivations and frustrations

outside of that, it’s not much like stalker

the big payoff of the zone in stalker was that it’d know your greatest desire, regardless of what you felt it was

annihilation doesn’t make it clear if there’s something acting on human emotion but the characters seem to believe it

I understood the book as saying - in a lovecrafty way - that even if nothing is acting directly on the brain, the effect of immersion in an alien environment is eventual madness. Very “Color out of Space.”

it’s a small group exploring an area that’s changed in some way that can’t be easily scientifically addressed and the real thing they end up confronting is their own motivations and frustrations

this is true of the book, which I wouldn’t deny has a closer connection to roadside picnic/Stalker. but in the movie they figure out what’s going on scientifically in 30 mins and the thing they end up confronting is a sequence of monsters trying to kill them