Annihilation (2018)

spronk said:

Netflix hasn't said at all yet when it will be up on Netflix for US customers, presumably Paramount insisted they not talk about it until its out of theaters so as not to tank ticket sales. It'll be up on Netflix France and Belgium March 7th and other countries (except US) March 12th so you can torrent it around then. I'd guess it'll go up on Netflix USA sometime in April?

and yeah after a few days I have to say the movie is dogshit, while I think it has some basic cool sci fi ideas it was just done way too slow and you feel like you HAVE to say nice things about it otherwise you are a "dummy who didn't get it" but there really isn't much to get about the movie, its a really simple story that most sci fi nerds will understand faster than the characters themselves and the characters behave like Prometheus scientists, and hand waiving away every bad move by "well, the Shimmer is fucking with their minds!" isn't good enough. There is a cool idea behind the movie but all I got to see was half of the execution, its like a short story that got stretched into 2 hours.

For recent Netflix movies for enjoyment I'd rank em as

Mute
Bright
Cloverfield Paradox
Annihilation

None were above a 6/10 though so thats a big problem for Netflix.

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Voyce said:

Most people are put off by the end scene which came off as more artistic and less Science Fiction.

However I give them credit for trying to be creative, there was an effort to create a "hair-raising" feeling of being trapped face to face with something completely different from anything, and the music blended enough where that in the theaters, that there was a creepy vibe to it. It wasn't great or really good Science Fiction though.

Everything else was a thriller/horrorish movie, but it was entertaining enough, and I like the ideas they floated, I wish they expanded deeper into them. The all female party is ok, but the nature of the women in the movie and their motivations for being their corrupts the ability to tell a natural Science Fiction movie, instead there's more focus on the characters that really don't belong their in the first place, and coupled with the strange surrealism of the Shimmer, you get all these weird events that probably could have been explained in a different way.

I still found it enjoyable, I suppose I like Science Fiction and unique ideas so I go softer on movies like this.

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Scoresby said:

So what was your take on the movie?

Spoiler

My take was that it was about cancer. It changes everything that touches it, mostly for the worst. It had been around for about 3 years, but was growing more aggressive and spreading. Some people want to understand it, some want to fight it, and some just accept their fate. Most who encounter it died (although leaving clues that may help the next people), and the scene at the end was her realizing that her husband would not be the man he once was, but neither would she. Maybe I was off-base, but that's what I took away from it?

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... said:

I just saw it with the wife. it was...bad at illustrating it's own message and symbolism.

I liked a lot of the scifi in it. it reminded me of the setting (not the story arc) of stalker shadow of chernobyl.

Spoiler

I think it's certainly an analogy for cancer. each character was symolic of ways folks take on cancer (or shit maybe even all the characters were stages of grief? anyway): acceptance, Fighting it, confronting/understanding it/doing one last meaningful thing,Loosing your shit, giving in and dieing. not sure on ripped apart by bear girl's symbolism. anyway as for the actual story:

A few things i noted.

1. glorious ineptitude. Why did the best minds on earth who were researching the first extra terrestrial phenomenon not only fail to send in larger, expert driven teams. why didn't they get fucking notebooks and write notes on paper. they knew electronics didn't "work" because drones went in and never came back? why didn't they send some one in literally 5 feet into the shimmer and have them giggle and run out and run tests on them? why did no one on the husband's team not throw phospheroous grenades down that hole when they decided the place was wacky/evil. I know I'd of wanted to burn that place down. I know in your zombie movies and such ineptitude is part of the "normal man in a bad circumstance" but this was supposed to be a focal point of american/earth security and exploration.

2. mind transferance/devolution?! early on it felt like everything was devolving and mutating. I thought it was insane that the mondo gator didn't tear that girl's leg off. there's no way you could drag a person away from a gator. But then when the bear/megatherium thing came back yelling in the dead woman's voice....I thought what had happened is that the girl hauled off by the bear had mutated into a bear, or the two of them had merged into one form some how. that's why i thought the thing followed them. yelled in the dead girls voice. then the dyke shot at/fought it. the bearsloth then walked into the room of it's former friends and tried to communicate with them, but could not. it was in pain, confused and scared. It was not till angrydyke came back and shot at it that it went primal. I briefly thought that the shimmer was turning people into de-evolved lifeforms and that the consciousness was trapped in those forms some how. I had thought the gator was a similar person/animal hybrid and that is why it didn't' go beast mode and eat every woman who ran into the water. but... I think i was just connecting dots and that the writers didn't mean for that. I think it was just hokey shit the writers put in to make scenes creepy/actiony with no link to the story.

3. the ending. I think one of two things happened "in the end". (and i suppose it could be both). as was said by flower girl. she was acceptance. Lina was "fight it", bosswoman was "understand it". When lina went into the cosmic butthole, she found her way inside of the HG Geiger structure of the epicenter of fuckery. In there, she found the lady. who "now understood" and was subsequently turned into energy, then used to create the kaleidoscope of dickery. The kaleidoscope of dickery, creates copies. it "divides" your whole self (LIKE all the cel symbolism!). I think the Kaleidoscope makes a copy of whatever gets nearby, which either then maintains form, or is reduced to a simpler state/mutates. i think the crystal trees were exposed the longest to the kaleidoscope, so they reached a very compact, unchanging form (crystaline). anyway. I thing husbando went into the butthole, and the kaleidoscope made a copy of him. and the two of them became bros, and talked about the situation. one of them was falling apart. neither was certain which was the original, but i presume the burned man was the original. They agreed that one had to go find Lina. So he did. She went in, went into the butthole herself. The kaleidoscope copied her. Husband was in a greif state. she wasn't, she was in an angry fight state. so she fought her copy. and eventually managed to trick it, burn it. and then the copy (being a copy of her) said fuck this shit and burned down the whole place.

Now after that. One of two endings happens. Either the real woman escaped, but is now full of wacky-ass DNA, which is changed, but no longer unstable because the Epicenter of Fuckery was burned down. She sees her husband. knows he's a copy, but she accepts him anyway, because she needed to get past their martial issues and he was as real as she was.

OR

everything happened, but the copy of her escaped and it was some how making a pod-person scenario happen. She was essentially lieing about any number of elements of her narrative to get closer to her pod husbando. she got back to base, saw pod husbando, and the two of them hugged, knowing that they both are now on earth and pretending to be humans. I'm skeptical about podperson theory because she was merely a copy. if she had plans to invade earth, her lame human copy will get annihilated by that giant room full of angry American soldiers. also, when she spoke to the husbando copy, he was confused, just like she was. the copies seem to not know if they are copies, and are so perfect, that a team of extra terrestrial super scientists could not discern he was false with all the labs in the world.

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