f13.net

It's both thrilling and bad. Watching it now. AMA

The weirdness of the acting is what bothered me the most. I could tell they were doing it on purpose, and somehow nobody noticed how artificial and off-putting it was. Or nobody cared. Portman and Leigh especially. What the fuck. Also nothing made any but the thinnest film of sense.

Some really beautifully horrific visuals, though: The man turned to lichen and the visitation by the screaming bear. Plus the whole ending sequence is as gorgeous, intricate, and pretentious as anything Darren Aronofsky ever dreamed of. I don't imagine anybody will give this much money to Alex Garland ever again. Either that or they'll hand him the next Star Wars.

The acting is terrible. But I don't really like Jennifer or Natalie.

The set and monster design is stunning.

I'm at the end now. This is turning rapidly into garbage.

Fuck this movie.

Well that was a roller coaster of emotions (the thread, not the movie).

It was pretty much all downhill with an appearance by manbearpigcow and a light tunnel.

IT WAS A TRICK OF THE LIGHT

Welcome to The Books.  A lot of good writing, all for nothing.

From what I've seen of reviews, the movie is the same type of thing.  Some pretty shots for little or no point.

How does it compare to Ex Machina on the Pretentious-o-meter? 

My wife and I really wanted to see this, but after finding out it was by the Ex Machina guy we decided to wait for reviews.  Just because a film is well acted, well directed, and even well written, it doesn't mean it's actually good.

I felt that Ex Machina was pretty open and straightforward about its pretensions. Nobody came out of it wondering what the hell the writer/director was trying to do. The real monster was men all along. At the end of the movie I could tell you exactly why everything happened, what all the characters wanted, and exactly who was deceiving whom and when. It's a nice little puzzle box that wants to lecture you about humanity and inhumanity. Fine.

Annihilation is not well-acted, well-directed, or well-written. It is only well made. Excellent concept art, great storyboarding, fantastic effects work, prop selection, and set design.

If I had to guess, I think it's about depression? I have no idea how any part of it makes sense. There's a big twist at the end that adds nothing and damages some of the sense earlier bits made. Everything happens for no reason other in order that the plot can proceed, and then the plot doesn't matter. That's not overall, that's at any given moment.

Nobody behaves like scientists. Nobody behaves like humans. This government project to save us all from a potentially world-ending threat employs maybe a dozen people and half of them are being sent on a suicide mission. Oh, and let's send this new lady too... the one who we've kidnapped to protect our secrecy. That shouldn't compromise the mission at all. They'll all die anyway and that way we don't have to kill her!

Seriously, schild is not overstating how bad this is. Do not watch unless you like that sort of thing. The risk is that you'll trip over this movie on cable, or that you'll start watching it on Netflix without understanding what it is, and it will be so beautiful, tense, and fascinating that you'll keep watching it wondering how it ends.

Then you'll be schild, too: all downhill with an appearance by manbearpigcow and a light tunnel.

I'm curious what the twist is that ruins the film.  Please post about it in spoiler tags, if you don't mind spending more time talking about Annihilation.

I didn't hate this movie but I can see why people did. It wasn't as bad as the cast would imply as my general fear was that nothing will happen as the girl scouts wonder the woods discovering the happy happy joy joy of mother nature.

Yeah the twist doesn't ruin the movie, it just calls into question some of the few concrete things we might have been able to understand. "Derails" is a good word, and not a lot was on track at that point anyway.

Also I didn't hate the movie, I was frustrated by it. It was exhausting and disappointing. I wish the ideas in it were turned into a better movie, and that I hadn't sat through this one.

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?

The movie was ruined before it was made because it the book was shit.

yea i wish I'd read the synopsis of the book before I watched the movie

the only english word for it is: garbage

The first book had a kind of "Bright and shiny Lovecraft" thing going for it. The movie was just bright, shiny, and weird.

--Dave

Lol, just ready the plot summary.  It's somehow even worst than the movie plot summary.

There was no possible way for a movie that was even remotely like the book to be a good movie, because the book is basically a long attempt to make you feel dread and revulsion--it has virtually no narrative, limited characterization, and is just generally not that great.

I read some sort of scifi book about rapid evolution, unavoidably spreading across the world when I was 15.  I swore this was that book because I couldn't remember the name but apparently the odds of two authors coming up with this are higher than I thought.

To bad this didn't turn out though.  Ex Machina was near fucking perfect, so had some high hopes.  I may give it a watch eventually, but literally everybody I know is shitting on it and the plot summary is terrible.

I like Alex Garland and I loved Ex Machina, but let's be honest, his batting average is fucking awful.

I liked it.  I thought it maintained the progression of strange well enough to get to a pretty alien place.  I can forgive the unnecessary technobabble, they kinda had to try I guess.

i think the verdict is in, no one is allowed to like this piece of shit

Well, part of the problem with turning this into a movie is that the book was almost intentionally vague and cryptic about pretty much everything that was going on.  Even after you finish reading it, you are left with far more questions than answers and the core question about what the fuck was going on inside the quarantine area is only barely answered.  You only really get a deeper explanation and most of the blanks filled in once you read the second book.  So if the movie ends up feeling mostly surreal and creepy but doesn't actually really explain much of anything at all, then I guess it actually did a pretty good job of translating the book to the screen.

After Paddington: I love bears!

After Paddington 2: I love bears so much!

After Christopher Robin trailer: Nothing will stop me from loving bears!

After Annihilation: aaaaaahhh AAAAAHHHH AHHH AHHHHHHHH AAAAAAHHHHH AAAAHHH AAAHHHHHHH AHHHHHH AHH AAHHHHHHHHH AAAAHHHHH AHH AHHHHH

Sauce: https://twitter.com/SidizenKane/status/974297056876560386

He liked the movie. He can't be trusted.

To be fair, that is one FUCKED UP bear.

I enjoyed the movie.  Pondering the many questions the movie leaves unanswered has been enjoyable too.

Didn't hate it but I was surprised by the number of extremely positive reviews this movie had. Reassuring to know it's not just me.

I think there's a tendency to imagine a movie where the lead character is dealing with a loss is raising profound questions, but that doesn't automatically follow.

This movie wasn't bad but I can see why people don't like it. It's somewhere between just enough science fiction to get you excited or pissed off for giving you blue balls.

Oh God, Schild was right, what the fuck was that.

Nope, nope, nooooopppppe.

That bear, though.  :ye_gods:

I might have skipped past it, but I don't think they explained why the movie was named Anihilation, or did they ?  :awesome_for_real:

It's the title of the book.

Oh, I knew that. I just found it funny that the movie (to my knowledge) did not explain that, or did it ? I don't remember anything posthypnotic in it.

It's just my opinion, but I think the gap between them crossing the border and setting up camp is strikingly similar to how the group arrived at camp in the book.  So "they were hypnotized" seems as good an explanation as any, since we're not given another one as to why they simply lost 2-3 days of time.

The movie differs from the book in another significant way, in that the border is moving much more quickly in the movie.  With the expectation that within years or months the border will cross a major city, and then presumably cover the world within a period of time I don't remember if it was specified, but I assume was within the lifetime of the current living population.

So, again, my opinion, Annihilation is used as the movie title because 1. the book title and 2. the looming threat of the annihilation of humanity by something they can't fight and can't understand.

It's a movie almost entirely about self-destruction.  Considering that, I think Annihilation is a pretty fitting title.

I saw this movie last night and didn't hate it.  Not gonna bother spoilering, it's almost out of theaters.

Dr. Jennifer Jason Leigh says it at the end when she's under the lighthouse and talking to Dr. Biologist about how the shimmer is going to break everything down to its atoms.  "Annihilation."  And then she annihilates.

So, I didn't read the book, and gather that the plot of the movie is pretty different in a lot of ways.  My takeaway from the movie is that the shimmer is like the Dark Side cave in Star Wars.  If you think it's scary, then scary things happen, like getting eaten by a bear.  If you think it's pretty and you decide you want to be a plant, then it turns you into a plant.  And there's some sort of intelligence behind it whose ultimate goal is to be able to integrate with life here in some way (e.g. by learning enough about humans to make independent copies of them).

It's not genius science-fiction, but it made a hell of a lot more sense than Interstellar.   :awesome_for_real:

interstellar was watchable though

this was like, really fucking bad

Strong disagree there.  I nearly walked out of Interstellar.

Just watching this. 40 minutes in.

And so so far its a lame-ass version of Tarkowski's Stalker

I mostly don't buy that because of the person who turned into a plant and how that scene played out.  She gives a speech about how it's going to change her into something beautiful and she's not going to fight it, and then instantly starts sprouting flowers and turns into one of the plant sculptures.

The one who's freaking out and paranoid and terrified gets eaten by a monster.

The one who's talking about annihilation spontaneously combusts.

The one who's trying to diagnose and understand it encounters a mirror of herself that's trying to diagnose and understand her.

If it's all supposed to be totally random and indifferent to what the people themselves think or do, the movie did a very poor job of conveying that concept.   :awesome_for_real:  It certainly starts off feeling that way but the plant-sprouting scene introduced a tone of mysticism into it that was pretty consistent after that.

There was also the whole everything burning up part -- it made no sense for the grenade itself to cause that much damage, so I interpreted it as an expression of Dr. Biologist's intent (it was more about her wanting it to burn than then actual grenade), and/or the shimmer-being having accomplished that phase of its mission.

Isn't this all we need to say?  I keep seeing this thread grow, and it seems like everyone is pretty much agreeing that it is maybe worth watching in the background late at night when you're working on something else or playing a game...

It's the second best sort of movie to talk about: A mediocre film that implies a better one. There's a lot of meat there to chew on. That it's bland, unpleasant meat just makes us want a real meal.

I watched this at last, and I liked it. It's a good sci-fi movie and it worked for me. Don't know anything about the books.

I almost never go to the theater anymore but I did go and see this because the man who wrote the book is a good friend of my brother in law.  Does that even make sense?  We also had to be somewhere else while people were looking at our house that was for sale.  I am not a big fan of this sort of Science Fiction generally.  After seeing this film, I am still not a big fan of this sort of Science Fiction.  I found the dialog kind of stilted and I didn't like any of the characters and the interaction between them felt awkward.  And movie theaters are so fucking loud it makes me want to scream!  Although I really like the fungi flowers.  They were very pretty.

From what I remember of the book, the Dialogue is supposed to be somewhat stilted, and most of the character interactions are intended to be somewhat awkward.  The people they sent into the quarantine zone are basically hand picked by the suits who send them in to fill a specific role, and are psychologically conditioned beforehand to try to suppress their personalities.   They are basically supposed to be treated like a control group with respects to whatever unknown forces are acting on the zone, mostly due to the suits knowing that the first group that went in exploring went stark raving nuts for no apparent reason.  So when the second team is sent in, they are sent in as "The Biologist" and "The Botanist" and "The Geologist", instead of "Jane", "Bob" and "Daniel".

It's supposed to be a story about encountering something so utterly alien that you can't even really begin to comprehend it, and the first book pretty much ends without having really answered much of anything, leaving you with more questions than you started with.  You pretty much need to read the second book to actually get a decent kind of closure on what kind of contact the author was going for.

Is it a decent read? I'm kind of looking for a good story to read as I haven't actually sat down and read a good story for a while.

I would say not really. If you really like Lovecraft, you might like it--it's going for the same sense of dread via mood and vague descriptions of body and mind horror.

I really like lovecraft, but this is bad.

I don't know if I would call it bad, but it is definitely more along the lines of "Lovecraft-lite".   It does a fairly decent job of building up tension and existential dread sort of vibes, but it lacks the teeth of proper Lovecraft.  The "other" in this one is built up to be more along the lines of incomprehensible alien, where the thing is just something we don't understand, doing something we don't understand, but isn't, on the face, inherently "evil", just "other".  Lovecraft on the other hand usually puts pretty heavy emphasis on the idea that the "other" is usually just so fucking out there that simply trying to understand it can drive you insane, and that a significant portion of the "other" are pretty close to evil incarnate.

I finally watched this because I love watching stuff that is almost universally regarded as shit. It's a sickness.

Yep, this was shit. Well-filmed shit with great effects but utterly wasted. Character development was 1-2 lines about something and then move on. Watching Natalie Portman get shimmered by floating space butthole was pretty but utterly stupid. The whole mirror body snatcher scene was just goddamn awful, like a middle school interpretative dance class recital being held in a warehouse in Soho awful. The movie felt like it was being clever when it was really just being pretentious and lazy and incomprehensible. The ending "twist" was telegraphed from the fucking beginning so I'm not sure why they seemed to think it would be clever.

But goddamn, that bear.

The only memorable thing from the movie. Fuck that bear. :ye_gods:

yea horror and sci-fi needs more of The Wrong Sound Coming Out Of Things