I really liked Vandermeer’s trilogy. Agreed 95% with Tom on Annihilation. (My point of disagreement is I thought Portman was good but Leigh was atrocious. You can’t really blame the actresses though; the script was awful.) I’m really not sure where the good reviews are coming from. What I couldn’t believe was that the whole Southern Reach trilogy plays with the idea of unreliable narration in ways that are unusual for novels (where it can be difficult to establish a consistent narrative voice through prose that signals its own unreliability), but happen all the time in film. But this film does none of that. There’s no attempt to examine whether the characters’ perceptions are reliable, and even though the events are ostensible related by the biologist after-the-fact, we get no sense (mostly) that she might be lying or misremembering or whatever. Communication–and the ways it breaks down or doesn’t convey a real sense of experience–is vital to the novels, but completely unexplored by the film. I was really looking forward to a visual realization of the novel’s conflation of “tower” and “tunnel”, which I thought was awesome, like you can’t tell the difference on a contour map. But they just stuck a tunnel (not filled with journals) at the bottom of the lighthouse. Ugh.
But even divorced from the novels and considered on its own as a film, it just doesn’t work at all. Like Tom, I thought the bear sequence was great, and the shaky-cam sequence with Oscar Isaac’s expedition in the swimming pool was pretty freaky, but those sequences were kind of part of a gallimoufry of scenes, mashed together with no attempt at tonal consistency. The score was good, but the movie was bad. Was anyone else reminded of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (better score, better story, better visuals), particularly during the self-immolation scene? What is it about aliens trying to communicate that makes people want to set themselves on fire?