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

Isaac has no SW vestiges which is wild considering he shot some scenes when bouncing between that movie and this one across the lot

unfortunately otm re: jackie drawl

I saw it last night and enjoyed it a lot. It helped that it's been a while since I read the books, which I loved; I was able to roll with the changes to the story and appreciate how much of VanderMeer's ideas, mood, and imagery made it onto the screen. I'm going to have to take another look at Stalker and Solaris but the Tarkovsky comparisons are apt. Some of the visuals in the beach scenes reminded me of Ballard. There's the gruesome sequence mentioned upthread but otherwise not much horror; I wonder if it got its R rating more because of the not-sexy sex scenes. It's easy to understand why the studio decided this would die at the box office: it's slow, somber, cosmic, and not at all child-friendly.

you kidding me? there's that video scene, the actual corpse/lichen/moss thing in the pool, the giant bear-thing that attacks, a lady with her throat ripped out, and a suicide by phosphorus grenade

no particular thing on its own might merit an R rating on violence, but there's a fair bit of random gore in there

yeah my friend who I saw it with had to look away multiple times, she was freaked by the bear thing

for an SF film, it's definitely scary, but I thought the total horror quotient was low compared to many R-rated horror movies ... I guess my tolerance is fairly high, but there's a lot of recent horror that's too much for me, and this isn't like that

I think the scary parts of Annihilation are especially powerful because the movie isn't just a succession of shrieking musical cues, pop-up scares, and gore effects; its quiet mood of disorientation and dread makes the horrific moments more effective when they occur

brief profile of Vandermeer and his thoughts on the film here:
http://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/2018/02/22/jeff-vandermeer-goes-hollywood-well-not-really-annihilation/364406002/

aw man i love "local author" pieces...

I’m hoping some people from my synagogue will want to come along and see it (the film) with me,” Ann said. “He (Jeff) would rather be watching things with a cat in his lap and you can’t bring your cat to the movie theater with you.”

is he on ILX?

More here about the books here: where lies the strangling fruit...Area X - The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer

asked my friend if he wanted to go see this tonight and he was like “u mean the ferngully meets prometheus movie?”

But so did he want to go

no ;_;

pod interview w/ Garland here

https://www.tiff.net/the-review/tiff-long-take-ep-54-alex-garland-on-annihilation-adaptation-and-the-future/

I went to see this with a group of friends and no one was super into it, but the ones who had read the books just hated it. I was entertained enough because I didn't really expect it to be as surreal and ambiguous as the book, but everything after they went into the zone was pretty heavy-handed and the deus ex machina ending was lame (I chuckled when the psychologist said the name of the movie and started spitting fire). Also we were making LFO synth noises for the rest of the night.

I did like how quiet it was for the most part! Like literally the silence between lines.

I think Arrival is a better sci-fi adaptation tbh, I felt a lot more invested in that (and appreciated the story-to-film changes more).

i didn't love this either. it got better once she got to the lighthouse, especially bc that stuff reminded me of (the much better) "under the skin." the first 3/4 of the movie was pretty boilerplate and a little dull, despite all the scares. but my bigger problem was there were too many unanswered questions that the director didn't seem interested in pretending to have answers for. i often love movies that i don't feel like i completely understand, but this just seemed to have a bunch of mysterious shit that didn't really connect to anything in any meaningful way, and the main character's/director's answer to all that is "i don't know."

It's funny, the book people were mad that there were too many answers, like the comet + alien explanation.

I kept waiting for at least a nod to the glowing living writing/infinite gibberish poem thing from the book, that could have been cool cinematically.

I appreciated that, by combining the lighthouse and the below ground part, that it addressed the "tunnel versus tower" rumination in the book :)

can we talk about the tattoo

gina rodriguez had it, i think from the beginning
the dead exploded soldier in the pool had it
natalie portman had it when she was being interviewed, but not when she was in the shimmer. but she had a bruise on that spot, that the tattoo maybe ... grew from?

that was the one element that I actually wanted some explanation for, and I am not an explanation-wanter

tbh the real explanation is that it's an element introduced for science fiction film nerds to debate the significance of

"Under the Skin" is a good example of a sci-fi adaptation that jettisons most of the novel (including the overexplained backstory) and vastly improves it in the process

Parts of this felt incoherent to me. I don't really see how the major theme of "self-destruction" maps onto the mutational acceleration in Area X--unless the idea is that self-destruction is the expression of a deeper Life Force--that Life is just a fancy way to Die, etc.

xp i haven't read the novel so not sure whether it's an improvement or not

but one criticism i read of "under the skin" that i thought was valid is that it relies on knowledge of things outside the movie (like already knowing it's based on a novel about an alien harvesting food) to make sense of it

I had no idea what Under the Skin was about and I thought that the abduction of humans for _some need_, although it being food wasn't clear, was communicated by the end.

xp I felt like the theme of self-destruction existed only because that's what the exploration group brought with them. There's no indication that whatever alien element has changed Area X has desires or intentions in any human way -- it appears to be reacting to whatever impulse is carried in, as the physicist states

You could theorize that it's like a virus that wants to exist and coexist with the environment where it's appeared. Only instead of trying to find a homeostasis with pure biological function, it's also attempting to balance with psychology and physiology. So it's attempting a yin-to-yang approach with intent.

i guess centering an entire movie around an entity/character with literally no motivations or goal is an ... interesting approach?

around an entity/character with literally no motivations or goal is an ... interesting approach?

metaphor for nature?

Sounds like... science fiction to me!

The idea that something alien would be intelligent in the way we perceive intelligence, or perceives reality in the way we do, is difficult to convey.

Arrival was kind of a lightweight version of that in that we could see entities that seemed to be biological and, although they communicated much differently, they seemed to have motivations and goals. That made it more of a reveal when their perception of reality was shown to be incredibly different from our own, even if all other things were equal.

Parts of this felt incoherent to me. I don't really see how the major theme of "self-destruction" maps onto the mutational acceleration in Area X--unless the idea is that self-destruction is the expression of a deeper Life Force--that Life is just a fancy way to Die, etc.

― ryan, Monday, March 5, 2018 6:37 PM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think that’s pretty much what Garland was going for. Thanatos/death drive on macro and micro levels of the story.

found this film really mediocre. promising first third but it just becomes rote at some point. no team has returned, okay, i got it, this is one of THOSE movies. and it is; just it then turns all wannabe psych at the end. and the effects keep getting worse. plus all those silly flashbacks! and mannnnn the script in this thing. on the nose and clunky as hell throughout.

also it's weird how "the shimmer" doesn't "refract" anything that's just constantly in the background, like it doesn't mutate their shoes into super soakers or ice cream and the grass and most trees are still basically normal, gravity and molecular bonds are all good, etc. too expensive i guess. that it turned into the "floridada" video at the end was acceptable i guess.

Welp, I guess there’s nothing more that needs to be said. Lock thread!

Netflix release tomorrow (so midnight tonight, if that is how Netflix works?). I've been avoiding this thread until I can watch it, with great anticipation.

Darn, Netflix UK actually says 12th March, the Guardian misled me by saying it was the 11th.

this was pretty good. I think it might be an unfilmable book, though. too bad all of the creeper stuff was removed, and the mind control stuff taken out. I kept expecting JJL's character to snap her fingers and say a code-word. otherwise, what was her motivation? hand-wave, hand-wave terminal illness? my biggest overall complaint is that the psychedelia after the floaty alien thing (which was way cool) was droney and overlong. the homunculus was overdone, and the burning went on too long, and the plot could've been served better by more spacing at the beginning of the picture. oh well. maybe extended edition will have more of the initial disorientation stuff. it could also have less of Natalie Portman's back mid-affair.

haven't read the books. thought the movie was real good. feel like ppl have ridiculous high bars for movies now. it was...good! good is nice! great is different! not everything has to be the ultimate!

this movie was so amazing that i lit myself on fire

Another thing. I read a piece with Oscar Isaac talking about how he filmed this across the street from Star Wars. Both movies have slender women who climbing into unexplained seaside ooky space butts to confront... themselves? Is it possible they used the same set and redressed it?

Who wore astral anus better? Amidala or Rey?

da fuq

watched this last night and it was... fine?

it's basically stalker + the last of us + images of present-day pripyat + that video that went viral a while back of the weird worm that jizzes out a root system all over a rock tho innit

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

this is v otm tho, they nailed the look of the place perfectly

One of the financiers David Ellison tried to get changes made to the last half hour which in my opinion was the saving grace of the film. Thankfully Scott Rudin had final cut.

I'm browsing David's Wikipedia and his sister Megan's - has there ever been a starker divide between the quality of two siblings work?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ellison

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan_Ellison

Big fan of the book, thought this film was absolutely dreadful, just bland and generic with none of the creepiness. Also Portman having seven years in the military and rising to full professor at Johns Hopkins would be I guess sixty? And the very subtle cancer metaphor of the book was somewhat overstated by I don’t know, ten overt mentions of cancer in the dialogue? What a waste. A massive letdown.

I'm wondering if the sound/visual component is going to be completely lost on anyone not able to see this in the theater (or without some ridiculous home theater) because the design was pretty striking on a large screen and droning sound

I enjoyed a lot of the design - especially the bear and the fungal efflorescence of the body in the lighthouse - but the drones were pretty rote to me, just like "we're laying in this drone bed to make this otherwise unremarkable scene portentous" trailer type work.

the soundtrack is pretty good tbh

although I swear one of the bass drone to rhythmic sections at the end sounds like a moderat song. I should bother Geoff Barrow about it on twitter so he can swear at me :)

Barrow has said on twitter that the first minute or two of that cue is Moderat, and then they riff on it

I'm pretty sure Matthew did not hear the film in a cinema?

whoa!

I should follow him on twitter

nah he's mostly an incoherent grumpy middle-aged bloke

found it though:

Yeh they did the first minute of the alien
Scene on the film we took it onto the climax from there it an amazing track &
We’ve tried to not be assholes and take the credit for it.