I don't know why producers are trying so hard to prevent people from seeing the sci-fi horror movie Annihilation. Not only was it given a limited cinema release in the US, but as a European I had trouble finding it on Netflix too. If I didn't already know it had come out this week I wouldn't have come across it at all, which would be a shame, because Annihilation is quite good.
A giant, swirling, petroleum-coloured bubble has appeared across the US wilderness. Anyone who goes inside of it never comes back, so its up to a team of military scientists to go inside, figure out what's going on, and not die in the process. Annihilation is based on a book of the same name, but will feel familiar to anyone who's read Roadside Picnic or any of the Stalker adaptations. They too deal with paranoid people, trying to deal with a scientific themed phenomenon that has a drastic effect on the local environment.
So that's an immediate recommendation for anyone who liked those stories. For everyone else, you will get a mixture of gruesome, imaginative body horror and scenes of depressed women exchanging scientific theories with one another. The biological justifications sounded fine to me, but my wife - a biologist - scoffed at references to prisms and hox genes, especially as they come out of the mouth of the movie's physicist character (physicists reportedly "don't know shit about that sort of thing" and are the sworn natural enemy of biologists). I don't know whether watching a sci-fi movie with experts makes them worse or better.
I had a good time of the film, especially in its decision to follow group of specialists who don't act like a pack of morons in the face of danger. The main take away is that Annihilation shows we can still make compelling horror movies in the 2010s without resorting to haunted houses and exorcisms.
2018`s Roadside Picnic
I don't know why producers are trying so hard to prevent people from seeing the sci-fi horror movie Annihilation. Not only was it given a limited cinema release in the US, but as a European I had trouble finding it on Netflix too. If I didn't already know it had come out this week I wouldn't have come across it at all, which would be a shame, because Annihilation is quite good.
A giant, swirling, petroleum-coloured bubble has appeared across the US wilderness. Anyone who goes inside of it never comes back, so its up to a team of military scientists to go inside, figure out what's going on, and not die in the process. Annihilation is based on a book of the same name, but will feel familiar to anyone who's read Roadside Picnic or any of the Stalker adaptations. They too deal with paranoid people, trying to deal with a scientific themed phenomenon that has a drastic effect on the local environment.
So that's an immediate recommendation for anyone who liked those stories. For everyone else, you will get a mixture of gruesome, imaginative body horror and scenes of depressed women exchanging scientific theories with one another. The biological justifications sounded fine to me, but my wife - a biologist - scoffed at references to prisms and hox genes, especially as they come out of the mouth of the movie's physicist character (physicists reportedly "don't know shit about that sort of thing" and are the sworn natural enemy of biologists). I don't know whether watching a sci-fi movie with experts makes them worse or better.
I had a good time of the film, especially in its decision to follow group of specialists who don't act like a pack of morons in the face of danger. The main take away is that Annihilation shows we can still make compelling horror movies in the 2010s without resorting to haunted houses and exorcisms.