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

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

Except “color out of space” is crap and the book is good

this thread is like a plaintext game of chicken, where posters urge each other on in a frantic escalation of wilder and wilder terrible opinions

I have tried several times to enjoy the writing of HP Lovecraft and it’s all quite bad

they figure out what’s going on scientifically in 30 mins

saying "everything is refracted, dna, radio signals, etc" is closer to philosophy than science, it's what a scientist would ruminate about if they wanted to say "nothing makes sense because the laws of nature are broken"

that’s a lot more than we learn about the zone

they spend some time ruminating on what the granting of desire means and why the zone would do it, iirc

xp Roberto love your take

new board description p much

I'm in the 'this was just fine' camp; I read the first book and it was ok but didn't grip me (just a personal aesthetic reaction to Vandermeer's particular brand of Weird). The freakiest moment for me was Portman sitting on the sofa reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which is exactly what I'm reading right now.

The movie goes over the top with the cancer stuff (and also with trying to explain the title), although I can interpret it as being how a biologist would interpret area x.

One point I haven't seen mentioned is that the movie changes the ending of the first Southern Reach novel in a way that shuts down the storylines of the second and third novels ... if the studio wanted a sequel the writers would have to start from scratch.

"another shimmer appeared!" done

I saw this last week on netflix and just read this thread. I had no clue this was a theatrical release, thought it was a netflix original and even for that I thought it was meh. Some parts looked great. I kept expecting Natalie Portman to break into her SNL rap when she was being interrogated post-shimmer.

imo it'd be more apt if she yelled "I am the black swan!"

'begun, these clone wars have'

One point I haven't seen mentioned is that the movie changes the ending of the first Southern Reach novel in a way that shuts down the storylines of the second and third novels ... if the studio wanted a sequel the writers would have to start from scratch.

― Brad C., Thursday, April 5, 2018 9:41 AM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Alex garland wrote the script after only the first southern reach book was out, wrote it as a standalone

this was fine.

the commentary mentions that the human-shaped plants were directly inspired by Garland being a big fan of the Alan Moore-era Swamp Thing

only listened to 1/3 of it last week but I caught that nugget

Deeply meh.

I thought parts of this were impressive, but not especially entertaining on the whole. I was annoyed by the way it introduced a lot of interesting questions and ideas only to pay them off first with a combination of gore and jump scares, and then finally with an extended 2001-style "woah, man" sequence which mostly felt like a way of distracting from the lack of narrative closure. Some of the effects in the first were intriguing, even if everything still looked a bit to slick and too clean, as is the standard in the CGI age (cringeworthy as the stomach sequence was, both it and some of the other effects could have benefitted from the touch of Tom Savini, if not Cronenberg), and even on those grounds the film mostly becomes a light show by the end. We also don't get nearly enough of Portman and Issac's relationship to care that much about it; like, it is obvious what motivates each of them to go into "The Shimmer" but what we see of their relationship doesn't really set up the emotional payoff that the film is clearly going for.

Haven't seen Ex Machina and I don't know anything about the books, but simply thinking of this film alongside its contemporaries, I vastly preferred Arrival in just about every way.

otm