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

Fun Home is great but left me a bawling mess

oh yeah sorry too many nights studying at (the same) bechtel hall

haven't read books

really liked this, would happily fight most of ye about it tomorrow.

ito ex machina, arrival, this comparisons they were all good-to-great tbh

thought themes/metaphors were obvious and done very plainly, but more than reasonably deftly. maybe a long time since i found a 'do u see' message within a psychological/fantasy refreshing and resonant as opposed to being a showy frustrating reveal

portman is a bad actress tho this is true

good book that was screaming to be turned into a movie.

now that I've read the book I find this sentiment baffling. Like Naked Lunch or Crash or The Story of Your Life, I feel the opposite - that it's screaming *not* to be made into a movie. so much internalized narrative, with a fixation on the inaccuracy of perceptions/senses, and the non-linear structure (ok I guess you could just jump-cut between a lot of flashbacks but...)

The book is way better, obviously.

I just watched this yesterday since I really liked the books. I wish someone had pushed the novel into the hands of David Lynch, as I feel he would have accurately translated what I liked about the novel: identities slipping away, the detached tone of the narration, the increasing strangeness of Area X (not just visually, but the off-ness of even the mundane parts of the environment). Maybe would have been better as a high budget tv series, where it could linger awhile.

I just don't think film is the ideal medium for unreliable-narrator-syndrome type narratives

I'm trying to think of film examples where it's done successfully but usually they involve dumb gotcha/reveal endings (Usual Suspects, Fight Club, etc.)

Not a huge Vandermeer fan, but I was pleased by this today:

Wow. Nice one, Dan Simmons. What a jerk. pic.twitter.com/6VKCFPvU6a

— Jeff VanderMeer (@jeffvandermeer) September 25, 2019

Our generation of speculative fiction fans really need to view past generations of right-wing anti-environment sci-fi authors with a critical eye.

didn't realize simmons was a right wing loon. that's ok though because i could barely finish Hyperion and it's sequel and decided he is not for me.

apparently he’s always personally been an asshole but was of many who ramped it up and took it public after 2001

Loved Hyperion/Endymion and some of his other books even though he's a right wing loon.

Flashback however is fucking abysmal and the one where his shitty views are on prominent display.

Needing some distraction from the news, so I'm watching Annihilation again...geez, why does it start out like Arrival, fer fuck's sake...?!?

— Jeff VanderMeer (@jeffvandermeer) January 4, 2020

Personally, I think the director had things he wanted to address that included Stalker and my book was just a convenient vehicle for that. Which created complications for me, given my book is not at all influenced by Stalker/Roadside Picnic.

— Jeff VanderMeer (@jeffvandermeer) January 4, 2020

that first tweet is a thread

not sure if serious

no, it’s definitely a thread

New show from Alex Garland. Pretty sure I'll be watching this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoNloYTsH0Y&feature=youtu.be

"(Playback ID: 7MsQp_v670f9y-sv)" is an episode of Mr Robot iirc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8klax373ds

interesting cast. dunno about longform fiction from this guy tho'.

maybe it's fine in context but characters who say "nothing ever happens without a reason" (more usually "everything happens for a reason") and writers who write those characters can, unless the character is obviously meant to be a grade A idiot, fuck right off.

the next line "everything is determined by something prior" - reasons are not causes.

any talk about his new show Devs? just starting it

“ my book is not at all influenced by Stalker/Roadside Picnic.”

sure brah

yeah, the cancer without radiation is taken directly from roadside picnic.

Devs is getting a little more interesting. It feels like a cross between Ex Machina and a few others, with a slow roll-out

I’m really digging Devs. The camera work is gorgeous, and I think some of it is shot at UCSC. Don’t want to spoil anything though.

We just binge watched the first 5 episodes of Devs, and it's pretty good, yeah. Some of the themes feel maybe a bit too well-trodden in sci-fi, but the look and sound of the show is consistently great, Salisbury and Barrow have done as great a job with the music as with Annihilation. And some of the visual details they've put into creating an eccentric tech geek's paradise are neat, love those ring lights around the trees, and the Dev team headquarters look amazing.

no idea what Devs is but maybe it should have its own spoilers thread so ppl idly scrolling thru here don't get them...

I’d be down for a thread

It’s a new show on FX/Hulu from Alex Garland fyi

Devs is an eight-part miniseries created, written and directed by Garland, currently airing weekly, that I'd intended to start until the spoilers above.

xpost

Sorry about that, though the stuff we discussed happens in the second episode, and it's not really a big spoiler regarding the main plot... Like I said, this is not really a mystery show, they show they cards almost right from the start.

I'll start a new thread and ask the mods to delete the spoiler posts.

A thread for Devs, the new Alex Garland show on FX/HBO (with SPOILERS)

Saw Men tonight. Good build-up for the first half, some beautiful shots, and a final 30 minutes that was insane and felt twice as long. Between this, I'm Thinking of Ending Things, and her weird turn in Fargo, Jessie Buckley seems to be the default actress for--I'm not sure how to describe whatever it is.

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)

This was a great film with a terrible name that almost kept me from watching it. Glad it didn't