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

this is going to be another one of those amazing sci-fi megabombs that lasts like 3 weeks in the theater isn't it

The poster and the font and Portman all make me think this is some kind of Phantom Menace sequel with M16s instead of lasers guns

Gotta say, that movie title sells itself in this moment in time.

Queen Amidala in "Stalker 2018"

Exactly

Queen Amidala’s double in Predator 2049: Return to Tatooine

Endor, that is

If the book is a combo of Roadside Picnic & Mountains of Madness, I’m curious how much of that will translate to the screen.

Would prefer Marble Madness

Saw this last night. I really liked it. It’s a verrrrrrrry loose adaptation but it does capture the general atmosphere of the book.

There’s a lot of stuff in here that is going to reward repeat viewings.

no uk cinema release wtf

wait waht

apparently this is being released only in the US, Canada, and China, with other rights already sold to Netflix

Man this guy loves Tarkovsky. Liberally rips off Stalker & Solaris in almost equal measure (mostly Stalker, but the final scene & the whole idea of being able/unable to love a simulacrum of your dead spouse- I mean give me a break). Still, you could do worse when ripping people off. I liked it a lot, and it had a fairly rowdy matinee audience totally gripped and silent, and there was no moaning or groaning when the credits rolled without a lot of questions answered or threads resolved. But having seen Solaris and Stalker, I'm not left with much to think about. Garland not only took the exact imagery of those films, sometimes down to specific shots (underwater seaweed just like the opening shot of Solaris), but all of the ideas are Tarkovsky's. So I'm not sure what to make of it, glad it's out there, it's very well made and paced and it's nice that there's more "intelligent" sci-fi out there that could be successful (posters and advertising and the shit title - i know it's based on a novel - made it look like some Hunger Games shit), but... what's the point if you've seen Solaris and Stalker?

In fairness the Stalker homage is baked into the book

yeah, along with the really lame title. again I liked the film, I like Garland a lot, but the similarities were overbearing and distracting and most importantly, left me with little to think about. But I just saw it a couple hours ago (ha!), so we'll see I suppose. Glad I got to see it in a theater, huge bummer about the distribution being so limited outside of North America. they got bad test audiences, because like I said, the crowd I saw it with was completely silent and gripped, and there wasn't one "oh COME ON!" when the credits came up. it's a very good film and I can only imagine how many people who have never seen a Tarkovsky movie will love this.

enjoyed this. makes up for that amy adams one

haha I agree. it’s far from perfect but Arrival was and is painfully overpraised.

This was fine trending to good. There were elements of the book I missed but the visual elements were pretty good, I liked the end also.

I do wish movies about people doing a mission of some kind would spend less time with those people being breathlessly grim.

this is going to be another one of those amazing sci-fi megabombs that lasts like 3 weeks in the theater isn't it

deep dive:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2018/02/26/annihilations-grim-box-office-fate-was-an-inevitable-tragedy/#247797134ed9

is it really looking that grim? there was a decent amount of people there when i saw it yesterday, wasn't just spillover from Black Panther

"a decent amount of people" only cuts it in 1974. opening smash or zilch.

but that was how Ex Machina was, total slow burn success. does Paramount really have that little confidence in it?

Ex Machina didn't have a star budget, I don't think

Right

I should read that Forbes article

Ex Machina was an A24 film, apples and oranges. Much lower budget, surely.

I think the book was a little too fresh in my mind and it hindered my ability to just let the film roll, so I really want to see it again

It's really its own thing. The thing I feel is a strength is that the major questions of the work aren't stated by characters, and when they are, they're not elaborated upon. That's going to be a weakness for any audience that needs themes spelled out.

I was in awe that the Southern Reach facility looked exactly the same from the outside as what I'd imagined when reading the book

My partner described this as “femme The Thing”

My favorite bit was the dance in the lighthouse with the double, which it turns out was indeed choreographed by a dancer.

that intrigued me, so here's the article I found after inevitably searching:
https://www.wmagazine.com/story/annihilation-natalie-portman-dance-final-scene

that was my least favorite part but only because the music was hurting my ears and I thought it went on just a little too long

My partner described this as “femme The Thing”.

Yes! I thought that the . . err . . . thing they encountered in the empty swimming pool was very "The Thing".

I kept thinking of lichens, and how they're symbiotic colonies of two different things (algae and fungi) living in balance. And they never say lichens in the film!

I was in awe that the Southern Reach facility looked exactly the same from the outside as what I'd imagined when reading the book

― mh, Monday, February 26, 2018

same!

x-post no but the colorful things that were growing all over the walls at the main station place they camped out at were pretty obviously lichens, right?

everything was a blend of organisms, really

Right that was the whole point but there were a bunch of things that looked particularly like lichens but just really colorful.

otm

Massive fan of the books so very stoked to catch this without seeing or reading anything about it other than Garland's struggle with the studio. Wanted to support this financially ('smart' SF i'm always in the theaters for, even though I hate theaters now; 45 minutes of trailers? fuck). Given that it had to be wrapped up in one film, it's not bad. Surprised by how much SFX they threw at this, I thought it looked fantastic. The ending sequence is a bit lame but really any conclusion Garland tried to bolt on there, considering the story trucks on for two more novels, was going to feel bolted on

A lot of the flaws are right there in the material as mentioned upthread (undeveloped Portman and Issac characters), so i forgive that, along with the Stalker comparisons. (When I was reading the books I never thought of Tarkovsky at all. Thematically though it has much more in common with Solaris rather than Stalker ...)

Non-book-readers' reactions to this are interesting – I heard a bunch of women from audience afterwards expressing disappointment that the film was unoriginal and not compelling but dressed up with a PC team to distract from that. Which brings me to something the movie had to ditch because of time: the unreal creepiness not of Area X but the Southern Reach organization. The only reason the team's female at all is because a few years in to sending people in there, the Reach is grasping at straws and trying to figure out what factor leads to everyone being killed, leading to weirdness like team members not being allowed to learn or use each other's names as well as random team composition. I think this is going to be one of those films that gets sought out on video, because it sits uncomfortably between a lot of genres and doesn't satisfy their individual dramatic demands

I think the lingering question -- is this extraterrestrial? what is it? -- is wisely sidelined by the discussion about motive. If this is something alien, why do we assume it wants something or even thinks in human terms of motive. What was the line from Radek, Tessa Thompson's character, about the motivations of the expedition? I remember she said Lena was looking to fight it, but I can't remember the exact phrasing when she referred to her own motivation or Ventress's

I think I need a second viewing

That's the scene that stuck in my mind too because I couldn't remember her phrasing

In the movie she said that the psychiatrist wanted to confront it and and Lena wanted to fight it but she didn’t think she wanted to do either of those things and then walked off and started sprouting flowers on her arms before disappearing. I think.

the image that stuck with me, other than the flowers, mosses, and lichens seeming so beautiful, is the part of the video they find where Isaac's character is doing ad hoc exploratory surgery and he turns to look at the camera

I have no idea what the direction he was given was, but the near-manic wild-eyed look he gave was almost scarier than any actual gore

xp that sounds about right. thanks, E!

I get seriously freaked by 'found footage' in horror films (probably starting with Prince of Darkness' last scene) so yeah was loving the shit out of the two videos that are in the movie. In the books there's a bit more done with that idea, I won't spoil it here, but it's extremely satisfying

I have no idea what the direction he was given was, but the near-manic wild-eyed look he gave was almost scarier than any actual gore

― mh, Monday, 26 February 2018 22:20 (yesterday) Permalink

OTM it felt like a glimpse of an even freakier, more fucked up story.

The last video with him commuting suicide by grenade was also very haunting

someone more informed than me should start a "future of film financing/distribution" etc. thread with regard to blockbusters, prestige, niche/art films in the current climate. maybe there already is one?

Oscar Isaac shooting some of these scenes across the lot from the Star Wars flick during the same week is some mind-bending shit. Kudos to him for acting in completely different contexts

that first video clip with the serpent-like intestine thing actually rivals most movies pitched as horror imo

I went to the bathroom and came back at the very end of that scene :(.

oof yeah i had to look away during that. totally agree about Isaac's insane manic wild-eyed look into the camera, by far the scariest thing in the movie

she's in The Lost Daughter too, although a bit less - whatever it is

I like a lot of Alex Garland, writer and director, but I'm really not sure what could convince me to see the new one. When I was last in the theatre and saw the trailer, even this little old lady in the back piped up "Why would I want to see that?"

You talking about the civil war movie?

Yeah. Not sure I really need it.

There’s a new book in the series coming this year.

Civil War was extremely unsettling overall, particularly the short Jesse Plemons scene, which might be as scary as anything I've seen in a horror movie as of late.

there are definitely eyerolly bits but it's fairly po-faced as things go

some are making it out to be like The Day After for a new generation, and some of the 'violence-porn to SHOCK U out of complacency' is in this film for sure, but I don't really find the description accurate.

really hits a lot of themes, not any very deeply, it kind of wants you to sit with your own discomfort for a bit. you're kind of left to your own fill-in-the-blanks on every character's past/personality, and there's no real examination of how the conflict began, you're also somewhat meant to piece that together; but I didn't think that was a bad thing, I don't think it would have been satisfying for constant drip-coffee dialogue pointing out "this here event and that here event led us here today".

a lot of 'fog of war', where enemies often don't know who or why they're fighting, who's winning/losing, and some of the conflict seems as expressions of localized despair and rage as opposed to part of a bigger mission. the scarier parts of the movie aren't the depictions of wanton violence, but the moments of beauty that torture people with memories of more civilized times before they inevitably drive by people hanging from a pole or see burnt out husks of cars littering the road, people standing in FEMA-esque lines waiting for water.

obviously given what the US is going through right now it's not easy to watch something like this, but it's also far enough away from our current reality that it isn't massively triggering. for one, the film assumes California and Texas would ever collaborate on anything, or that a Floridian militia could ever become organized and terrifying on a national scale.

It's essentially like from the journalists' perspective? That's my impression.. I might check it out in the future but no big rush to see this in the theaater

Yea entirely from theirs

I'll let you know. I may go to a screening tonight.

I thought it was very very good

Annihilation is screening this month at the imax screen at the OMSI Sci-Fi Film Fest in Portland, OR.

They are also screening Stalker.

(Not Solaris, tho, which is disappointing)

Nice write-up Neanderthal. I saw this yesterday and enjoyed it

my kid came home from school annoyed today that his government teacher went off on the movie in a very predictable fashion, primarily that there wasn't enough explicit stuff about race and that 'the only person of color sacrificed himself for a white girl'. my son didn't want to get into it with her but was fuming that she overlooked the explicitly cuban journalist, and that she seemed to not pick up on every element of subtext in the film (like, the entire Jesse Plemmons sequence). It's a complaint I've seen a lot online. IMO it's really quite obvious that Offerman is a Trump stand-in (third term, 'greatest victory in the history of mankind', 'antifa massacre', disbanding the FBI); it's only the inclusion of Texas in the WF that makes this not a 100% proxy for the current situation. I did think perhaps it would have been wise to not have a white girl as the main protagonist, but then she would not have lived past the Jesse Plemmons scene and would never have made it to the end of the movie. I think the film did an amazing job of telling a story from a unique POV, and developed very realistic characters for whom the viewer builds an incredible amount of empathy in 2 hours.

The final 15 minutes or so of this film are among the most intense scenes I've ever seen in a theater (I generally avoid war films).

(I guess that actor is Brazillian but since the character was from Florida I assumed he was Cuban)