Film 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.
Film You know when you feel something's wrong but you feel like you have to keep moving forward?
I don't know what I expected when I went to see Annihilation. And I would have been wrong anyway. This film is hard to really place.
Some call it sci-fi. I guess it counts, but it's not about the science. It's about the people... and I guess that's what any good film is, isn't it? But then there's the visuals. They stick with you. They're both horrifying and beautiful at the same time.
Then the tone... sometimes it feels like an action flick, sometimes a drama, sometimes horror, sometimes totally indie arthouse stuff. I don't know, it's hard to classify, and it's pointless to do it.
I could go on for a while about symbolism and be all philosophical about this movie, but to be honest it's more of a film to just watch and let yourself get absorbed in it. It does a great job of just giving you that horrible feeling that something's not quite right, but you just have to see what's around the corner even though you're feeling thoroughly creeped out.
...and it's been a few months since I actually watched the movie and I only just realized that's exactly what the main character is experiencing. Huh.
Yeah, it's that kind of film. I find it hard to put into words why it's so enjoyable. It's not a fun or action-packed film that I usually enjoy but it definitely made me feel uneasy but I just couldn't stop. Then it just stuck in my head long after it was over and I just kept thinking about it. I like that. I won't say I fully understood everything about it, but that's part of what's great about the movie.