This is pretty much me too. I saw this right after watching Alien Covenant on TV, and while Annihilation wasn’t everything I thought Garland might be able to make it, it was so much closer to the spirit of the original Alien than the last two Scott movies.
Loved it. Terrifying, intriguing body horror. Excellent music, beautiful visuals that were equally scary and pretty.
Loved it, loved it, loved it.
Yeah I loved it. Garland is quickly becoming one of my favourite movie people.
Reminded me of STALKER, which is always a bonus. Beautiful ending.
I didn’t like it at all.
(Stalker spoilers as well)
I found that the first half-hour was intriguing (the homecoming was pretty fantastic!), then it took a deep plunge into the cliches’ sea. Again, I can’t tell if the cast is bad, or the lines were awful, but in any case it made me cringe. Like my immediate neighbour, I was thinking I was witnessing Stalker in Bizarro world mid-through, which was hilariously confirmed by the awesome and dumb ending. The illustrious movie needed to end with a nuclear blast, I always knew it!
So bad and overall stupid it could have been a Ridley Scott movie.
Withdrawn.
I keep forgetting about this… Scheduled a time slot for tomorrow to go see it!!
By the way, Roadside Picnic is one of the reasons why I didn’t like the book. Blindsight is to blame, too.
I liked it, could’ve been stronger in embracing the New Weird, as in witnessing something utterly alien and incomprehensible. The only movie where I think that really works is still Space Odyssey.
And yeah, the very ending was a disappointment. Mostly because I’ve read the book series, and it is quite a leap away from that.
I saw this last night. First half was nice. The last act was very short. I was expecting more. This was not a long movie.
I wish they had done more with the doppelganger stuff, but without the walking/fighting spess alienz. Also, she defeats the whole organism with one grenade and the movie ends? LOL, lame!
Sheesh, man, please put that kind of thing under a spoiler tag!
Sorry!
Yeah I wouldn’t mind that. As far as the single grenade goes, I guess the alien shimmer man straight up done goofed by contacting the fire. I guess like War of the Worlds and Signs…a single unknown can utterly destroy you. I suppose it bothered me lest because of the fractal nature of the shimmer alien shit and how it duplicates and spreads and takes from the entire environment. Duplicating and spreading fire around can’t be too healthy. Although Kain back at base is still a doppleganger and Portman is still forever changed. Anyone notice her 8/infinity tattoo originally belonged to the girl that gets mauled by the skull bear with Shepard’s horror screams?
In the books, Portman is a doppleganger too at that point in the story. Notice how we never actually get to witness her leave the afflicted zone. She just sort of shows up back at the base, and is then interrogated by the Southern Reach.
The Ouroboros tattoo shows up on multiple characters, including at least one of the men from the prior military expedition. I guess they would chalk this up to the shimmer “refracting” everything or whatever. A little silly though, considering tatts have nothing to do with DNA.
The stupid twist in the ending sucked.
I just assumed the shimmer dissipates after taking out “ground zero” and she is the sole survivor so the “back again” trek can safely be omitted. There’s that remark about them sending a team to where the lighthouse was, and they returned effortlessly to report it was all ash. As far as Portman being a complete doppelganger: Weird. This doesn’t make much sense with what is shown in the movie since the shimmer duplicate clearly gets it’s shit wrecked, and unlike the husband, it never shows Portman getting killed/replaced like him. I’d probably need to watch it again but she seems more herself at the end compared to her husband who is like a different person entirely.
Well, in the books, the shimmer doesn’t dissipate. It grows by 1000%!
I concur, it’s clearly the doppelganger that eats the grenade. A replacement offscreen would be silly - given the story, if you’re going to replace here it’d be during the confrontation with her methaphorical dark mirror, and it happening after doesn’t even work given what we’re shown of the alien immolating. There’s no big doppelganger twist in the end. She’s been indelibly changed by the shimmer, but it’s still her.
Yeah I thought as much as well. The only thing that was not apparent was what exactly happened to Dr. Ventress in the heart of darkness. It’s hinted at she is already a duplicate but without the original, or they merged somehow…but then she essentially gets deleted (or annihilated) from the shimmer entity database because it ran out of hard drive space or something…then it runs the process to duplicate Portman. I am pretty sure the shimmer can have multiple duplicates in runtime? (There is at least one other duplicate we see earlier like the deer)
I see it as a Solaris/Stalker kind of thing. What’s eating those characters? In Ventress case, it’s her body turning against her on a cellular level, so the alien becomes a part of her and disintegrates her. In Lena’s case, it’s her bad, self-sabotaging choices, so she faces a dark mirror of herself.
Ha ha, you guys are trying to make sense of the Annihilation movie.
(I actually am enjoying your conversation, but I get the sense you guys are putting more thought into it than Alex Garland…)
-Tom
Laffo…don’t mock us!. My entire take on the film is firmly one word: LACKLUSTER! But I will discuss it, because it is weird heavy sci-fi hardcore bullshit etc…which I like.