|
LORD OF BOOTY posted:You're aware STALKER is already largely based on a movie called Stalker, right? You just made my weekend dude
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2018 21:04
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 25, 2024 19:11 |
|
|
Marx Headroom posted:You just made my weekend dude It's not quite the same (the movie's a lot more minimalistic story-wise than the games, the games expanded things a lot) but it'll seem familiar pretty quick. It's also a loving fantastic movie.
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2018 21:10
|
|
|
The original story, A Roadside Picknick, is also great and bridges the game and film it inspired quite well.
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2018 21:56
|
|
|
I honestly thought it was common knowledge among STALKER fans that the games are basically Roadside Picnic/Stalker fanfiction, like I kinda intended that original post half-jokingly since I figured I was stating the obvious.
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2018 22:03
|
|
|
Roadside Picnic and Stalker are so popular in Russia that theres a subculture based around it. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/roads/2014/09/the_stalkers_inside_the_youth_subculture_that_explores_chernobyl_s_dead.html
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2018 22:15
|
|
|
TerminalRaptor posted:drat that is freaky and cool. Book spoilers: that was actually a great reveal in the book the women were the 12th expedition and her husband was a part of the 11th, but she finds hundreds of journals piled in the lighthouse. TerminalRaptor posted:Has anyone said Also they don't ever discuss approaching by sea, but can assume it is not possible. As you get further away from the border time and space seems to dilute and the characters surmised that the distance to the border by crossing the sea could approach infinite. Again, some more details of the border revealed at the end of book 2 make this even crazier, as the border isn't necessarily holding to our ideas of geography. Danger fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Mar 2, 2018 |
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2018 22:19
|
|
|
Danger posted:Book spoilers: that was actually a great reveal in the book the women were the 12th expedition and her husband was a part of the 11th, but she finds hundreds of journals piled in the lighthouse. Thank you for sharing that. I find these kinds of details really awesome. I wish they had hinted at them a little more in the movie. I am surprised I was not terrified of the scarebear. I still think it was scary as hell, but when they encounter it, you already have a understanding of what is going on inside Area X. It's definitely still nightmare fuel, but nowhere near as bad as the mimic was to me. Was it intentional that the bear ripped her throat out and went on to mimic her voice or was that coincidence? Given the fact it had a human skull embedded I thought it was just coincidence, but the way the focused on her throat being shredded when Lena found her was odd.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2018 01:13
|
|
|
TerminalRaptor posted:Thank you for sharing that. I find these kinds of details really awesome. I wish they had hinted at them a little more in the movie. Of the two women it kills, it rips out the jaw/throat in both of them almost exclusively. I thought it was 'eating' the voices, and that was why it was trying to get the three tied up women to speak, even though it knew right where they were.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2018 01:19
|
|
|
Dienes posted:Of the two women it kills, it rips out the jaw/throat in both of them almost exclusively. I thought it was 'eating' the voices, and that was why it was trying to get the three tied up women to speak, even though it knew right where they were. I take back the not terrifying statement.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2018 01:47
|
|
|
Dienes posted:Of the two women it kills, it rips out the jaw/throat in both of them almost exclusively. I thought it was 'eating' the voices, and that was why it was trying to get the three tied up women to speak, even though it knew right where they were. Jesus Christ dude
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2018 04:24
|
|
|
Dienes posted:Of the two women it kills, it rips out the jaw/throat in both of them almost exclusively. I thought it was 'eating' the voices, and that was why it was trying to get the three tied up women to speak, even though it knew right where they were. Haha I take back what I said earlier about the bear.* * I said it was bad.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2018 05:40
|
|
|
This was real bad. Super flat characters, lots of wasted potential.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2018 05:46
|
|
|
Was kinda disappointed how...normal? Regular? Everything seemed. I know it’s unfair to compare the movie against the book, but I never felt the movie reached the delusional unreality the book pulled off really well. A bit of hanging vines and colorful flowers in an otherwise normal environment didn’t do it for me.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2018 06:49
|
|
|
I liked the last act of this movie a lot. Aside from JJL being great I found the first act chill and emotionally by the numbers, and the second not quite weird enough for me. I’m pretty tired of SF movies doing “characters have neutrally sad expressions in crisply coolly lit scenes of architecturally interesting homes,” though. Between this, Ex Machina and Arrival I’ve felt a lot of detachment and sterility in the cinematography of cerebral SF movies. The Area X colors were great, but undercut by the script overexplaining. Just let the pictures show us, Garland! Don’t babble nonsense about DNA! I liked the through line about cancer and self-Annihilation. I hate tactical logic nitpicks but I just can’t get over this one. Couldn’t they have used one line to establish that they’re sure people sent inside don’t die instantly? A gradual loss of contact makes a lot more sense than ‘nothing comes out’ because if you’ve never gotten the littlest bit back then how do you know everything isn’t just vaporized? (The movie does show us the Shimmer is a little translucent, so maybe they can see enough to know it’s not just instant death.) The books are very good, buy them.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2018 07:03
|
|
|
meanolmrcloud posted:Was kinda disappointed how...normal? Regular? Everything seemed. I know it’s unfair to compare the movie against the book, but I never felt the movie reached the delusional unreality the book pulled off really well. A bit of hanging vines and colorful flowers in an otherwise normal environment didn’t do it for me. I thought the end really got there, as did the vivisection video and associated corpse, but yeah, I wanted more weird.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2018 07:04
|
|
|
General Battuta posted:I thought the end really got there, as did the vivisection video and associated corpse, but yeah, I wanted more weird. Yea, I was trying to explain my disappointment to my wife and the best I could do was say the book has the strangeness of the last 10 minutes. I especially liked the suffocating tension of parts of the encounter, and that bug-eyed look of not-quite-terror and it seemed odd to not utilize that particular sense of dread and go for big bear scares instead. Edit: I also agree with an earlier poster who said the film looked cheap. I don’t expect any studio to pump a ton of money into a movie like this, and they couldnt rely on a static location like in ex machina, but it felt limited and unrealized. meanolmrcloud fucked around with this message at 07:24 on Mar 3, 2018 |
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2018 07:19
|
|
|
Yeah there were awkward points where bits of colorful flower/mold were just like, stapled onto the trees at the edge of the frame, poo poo looked like a Michaels aisle in Easter season
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2018 07:39
|
|
|
r/BreadStapledToTrees
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2018 07:49
|
|
|
One notable change I thought detracted, that I can understand why they combined it with another, but was central to the book : was combining the tower with the lighthouse. The tower/tunnel in the book was this thing that in some stream of consciousness way had some obvious connection to the light house but still defied any kind of logic. Like you knew an impossible pattern existed Also the final reveal in the third book of what the tower and crawler really were was one of the most hosed up weird things in the entire thing. Danger fucked around with this message at 15:41 on Mar 3, 2018 |
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2018 15:33
|
|
|
"The characters were actually dead" is the second most boring interpretation of a movie after "it was all a dream". I liked this analysis: quote:What I think this movie is about is: Personal change. It's like Lena says at the end-- the Shimmer wasn't destroying, it was changing, making "something new". I started thinking about this concept during my second viewing when I realized just how strongly the film seems to revolve around her relationship with Kane. It starts out with "him" returning to her, and it ends with the two of them together, with all those intervening flashbacks. Obviously this movie ultimately wants to be about them and perhaps say something about the nature of relationships.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2018 15:56
|
|
|
Danger posted:Also the final reveal in the third book of what the tower and crawler really were was one of the most hosed up weird things in the entire thing. I've read the books all the way through twice and I'm still not clear what you mean by this. Would you mind clarifying a bit? I'm sure it'll be something I'm somewhat aware of, would just love to make sure.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2018 21:55
|
|
|
Does the book have cancer vibes too? I kept picking up on a feeling of infection or bodily invasion. The scientists desperately want to know the motive of the shimmer but there is none, because sometimes things just die from within for no reason. A cancerous cell is just acting abnormally and dividing, a virus is just replicating. Knowing why doesn't bring comfort if something like that is killing you.
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2018 00:17
|
|
|
The Clap posted:I've read the books all the way through twice and I'm still not clear what you mean by this. Would you mind clarifying a bit? I'm sure it'll be something I'm somewhat aware of, would just love to make sure. The tower itself is the body of the lighthouse keeper and the crawler is his brain.
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2018 01:00
|
|
|
Elderbean posted:Does the book have cancer vibes too? I kept picking up on a feeling of infection or bodily invasion. The scientists desperately want to know the motive of the shimmer but there is none, because sometimes things just die from within for no reason. A cancerous cell is just acting abnormally and dividing, a virus is just replicating. Knowing why doesn't bring comfort if something like that is killing you. In the book the entire 11th team including her husband return as copies who quickly die of cancer.
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2018 03:45
|
|
|
Danger posted:The tower itself is the body of the lighthouse keeper and the crawler is his brain. Woah this owns holy poo poo
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2018 03:51
|
|
|
cult member at airport posted:I liked this analysis: I think that's more or less the interpretation I had of the movie. The scene with Kane sitting down with the white phosphorus grenade introduces a visual reference to Buddhist self-immolation, which fits with the overall recurring theme of the characters being afraid of losing themselves to inevitable change. Ventress's quote about annihilation being a state where your component parts are broken down until no discernable you remains makes it seem like she epitomizes a character who is defeated by the fear of her own impermanence. Kane and the main character's reunion seems to be a somber recognition that you can survive without being the same person as you once were, even if in this case it means it literally. I think it's pretty on-the-nose to have the two characters who are soldiers return from a military operation where things went disastrously horribly and all their comrades died, and have them ask each other "Are you the same person that I knew before the mission?" I would say that overall, the main thing the movie seems to be aiming at is that trauma changes who you are as a person. I feel like the characterization is a little weak, though. Everyone other than Natalie Portman's character all succumb to their thanatos drive and she claims the reason she doesn't is that she was the only one who had motivation for returning. But it seems inconsistent to me that she'd say that. It seems like the reason she took the mission to begin with is because it's, in her words, a suicide mission. She already reunited with Kane at the very beginning of the move and still went in out of guilt. If it was, in her mind, supposed to be a trial to help her be square with her husband rather than a place to go to die, then that really didn't come across. I suppose one way to take the film is that outside of the Shimmer, the characters were ready to slowly self-destruct, despairing at some loss of what they perceived to be what their lives should have been, the people they believe they once were. But inside the Shimmer, the "true reality" of existence is highlighted and exaggerated. Things recombine all the time, nothing stays the same. Mutation and change are completely outside of your control. And your death isn't just some ultimate dead-end, it's just a step in a larger process where your constituent parts go on to be recycled into a new form. I suppose in this case, Kane's doppleganger surviving is a direct foil to Ventress. She enters the same womb/tomb that he does, but while she sees it as a place where she can be utterly annihilated, Kane finds a way to transform it into a continuation of life.
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2018 08:26
|
|
|
Just saw this tonight and I generally liked it. I've been meaning to read the books for a while and I guess I'll need to, now. With regard to the tattoo, I don't think I noticed it on the sober woman's arm. However, it was definitely on the dead dude splattered on the wall of the deep end of the pool with all sorts of poo poo growing out of him when they panned down from his head. I figure it must be something that was intrinsic to Area X, though the physicist didn't have it when we got a look at her left forearm growing plants, which surprised me.
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2018 08:55
|
|
|
Aside from the guy spilling his guts, was there a single white dude in this movie? I loved it, I’ll probably grab the books from the library.
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2018 16:20
|
|
|
I felt the ending was a bit lazy, the eye flash seemed to make Natalie into an unreliable narrator who just told a shitload of lies, just for a cheap horror cliffhanger. I guess they were going for some sort of Adam and Eve/try again to make the relationship work as literally new people/possibly some reference to Cain and Abel thing. It just came across as tacked on and didn't fit, though.
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2018 17:58
|
|
|
Cephas posted:
I think its consistent, personally. She went in out of guilt/self-destructive urges. In her encounter with her mimic, there was an exchange - she got its urge to get out (the same thing that drives it to expand and Kane-clone to leave) and it got her self-destructive urge. Her motivation for returning, like the shimmer in her eyes, is just evidence of how altered she is.
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2018 18:10
|
|
|
Goreld posted:I felt the ending was a bit lazy, the eye flash seemed to make Natalie into an unreliable narrator who just told a shitload of lies, just for a cheap horror cliffhanger. I guess they were going for some sort of Adam and Eve/try again to make the relationship work as literally new people/possibly some reference to Cain and Abel thing. Imo setting up an unreliable narrator was not the intention at all there. Although I guess depending on how you look at it, it is a possibility but it's not something I ever really considered.
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2018 18:10
|
|
|
chiasaur11 posted:The book had explanations for most of that that the film kind of abandoned. Book Chat:Did they ever explain how all the journals made it to the room in the lighthouse and why there were hundreds of them? I know that they sent more expeditions than they had claimed, but I got the impression that there were more than even that
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2018 19:44
|
|
|
I enjoyed the movie and the body horror was Grade A, but I really could have done without anything outside the Shimmer. The writing left a lot to be desired. Also I got cancer vibes from the books, but goddamn did the movie take that copy of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and beat you in the face with it.
|
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2018 03:27
|
|
|
I liked it a lot. My initial reaction is that I like it more than the books, which had way better ideas than execution, imo. So did they just reuse the set for the house? Book spoilers The whole plot point about the post hypnotic suggestions in the books was dumb as hell too Spite fucked around with this message at 04:49 on Mar 5, 2018 |
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2018 04:47
|
|
|
this movie was absolutely 100% perfect. that is all
|
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2018 11:22
|
|
|
I had no idea Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow were doing the soundtrack. I love Drokk. Roll on the 12th.
|
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2018 13:27
|
|
|
Professor Shark posted:Book Chat:Did they ever explain how all the journals made it to the room in the lighthouse and why there were hundreds of them? I know that they sent more expeditions than they had claimed, but I got the impression that there were more than even that I think media in general has decided that people can create elaborate logs of things they never would have any reason to log and leave them in places they wouldn't have been so the protagonist can get backstory. Like it doesn't make sense, but it's not made sense across so many sci-fi books and movies and video games that "I wrote a journal of how I died while I died and also that journal is hidden in a totally different place than I was" is just is a trope that you are supposed to hand wave away. It's useful enough a way for someone to get backstory on something in a more organic feeling way that stuff just does it even when it can't quite line up how it works.
|
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2018 16:59
|
|
|
cult member at airport posted:I liked this analysis: More than one character in the films says all of this out loud.
|
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2018 18:26
|
|
|
Cross-post from gen chat:K. Waste posted:my next black-and-white re-editing project is gonna be Annihilation.
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2018 01:33
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 25, 2024 19:11 |
|
|
I liked this way more than any of the super-cerebral sci-fi films of recent years, including Ex Machina. Simply because this went that much further into legit weird as gently caress territory. Like it's got elements of Tarkovsky, Cronenberg, Carpenter, H. P. Lovecraft (Colour out of Space), maybe a bit of Lucio Fulci, and I can't be sure but I feel like Alex Garland has probably seen Alien Contamination at some point.
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2018 04:24
|
|
