Annihilation

I appreciate Garland for one thing: how he is able to seduce critics, through his bloated and, in this case, nonsensical B-movie, to write about sci-fi masterpieces. Which is the case of a film that looks quite bad on television and is vague everywhere where it should be concrete and concrete everywhere where it should be vague. Truly a daring film. (14/03/2018)

Thanks God Garland didn’t make Arrival. Thanks to this, it did not lose its humanistic subtext and rational explanation, something that cannot be said about Annihilation. The surrealistic wandering through fantastic landscapes, decorated with brilliant set design and minimalistic music, is beautiful to watch and listen to, but the story is at times a survival, at times a parade of CGI monsters, and a nondescript finale. Sure, we don't always need a literal interpretation, but if it's WTF, it would kinda sting. Garland is a tinkerer of technology, a master of atmosphere and slow-burn stories about a few characters, but here he gets too wrapped up in the themes. There’re still a few brilliant directorial ideas, though. (14/05/2018)

It pays to put off seeing some films until the effects of the PR massage have worn off and the wave of reviews and screams on social networks and databases has dissipated. One can then approach those films largely free of the ballast of responses and expectations. Annihilation is a case of a work that not only benefits from the viewer having a clear and open mind, but to a significant extent absolutely requires it. This is not a sci-fi movie that takes pride in its scientific credibility, but rather in pure wonderment drawn from new worlds and forms in which it urges viewers to immerse themselves. The appearance of fauna and flora here can evoke the apocalyptic and environmental visions of Hayao Miyazaki. Except unlike those visions’ ecological logic of cause and effect, and thus the effort to move from parasitism to symbiosis, the world of Annihilation has no logic, meaning or goal. Its only principle is assimilation and transformation through growth. Garland introduces motifs of loss and self-destruction into his loose adaptation of the original novel of the same name and concurrently adds in the backbone of a possible interpretation of the entire narrative as metaphors for the turbulent dynamics of a relationship between two people and their complicated path back to each other, whereas it is an unavoidable fact that the end of a journey cannot be the same as the beginning. Thanks to its intentionally enigmatic nature, however, Annihilation works best as an expedition to another world that is extraordinarily captivating due to its grotesque monstrousness, unsettling volatility and spectral beauty. In today’s deluge of blockbusters heading out to new planets that remain pleasantly conventional, Garland has succeeded in bringing an element of fascinated wonder back to film. (25/09/2020)

Damsels in distress slightly differently. Sophisticated chamber slow (you will feel it is twice as long; but it's not a complaint) second-rate movie, where, however, everyone behaves logically and appropriately in given situations and which takes the same from Strugacky as from Things and Arrival. But surprisingly little of VanderMeer's original. On the one hand, the scenes are both captivating and disturbing, atmosphere is dense. On the other hand, it is supposed to be a hardcore sci-fi movie that is rich in interpretation and that has dimension overlap. And I am not at all sure whether it is justified and or whether the movie is just pretending to be that way or if it is just banal. In any case, (not only) for these reasons, it will make you wonder about staff, that´s fur sure. The movie will not get out of your head as soon as you see closing credits. (12/03/2018)

Set in a green rainforest (and on a beach), Annihilation is a more intellectual version of The Thing. It has a rather mainstream theme with a slightly B-movie nature but interesting ideas, escalated into a hitherto unseen close encounter of the third kind, fascinating by its far-reaching imagination and a provocative need to find as many answers as possible in it. The final scene is a return to genre rules, but it turns out well. Garland is not a hitmaker, but rather a hard-core sci-fi filmmaker. While Arrival was about the relativity of the perception of time, Annihilation is about the relativity of biological lifeforms. Totally different, but in both cases brilliant, innovative sci-fi works, ambitious in their content. (24/12/2018)