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I'm genuinely surprised for the love this moving is getting here. In my personal opinion I thought it was at best a 6/10. I went into this movie cold, knew almost nothing about it, and left thinking that there was a tremendous amount of wasted potential. As others have said, I thought the tone of the movie was very confused and that it never really settled on what it wanted to be. After reading some of the backstory I see that assessment was correct. Most of what I have to say will be redundant to this thread, but I really do think that the movie world needs to reassess Natalie Portman. When she is in her element, Portman is very strong actress- but I'm beginning to believe that her range is very limited and that when she gets outside of it she's extremely wooden. For a few movies I have written this off as the character, or the writing, but I think it is in large part her. Watching the movie tonight, despite its flaws, I couldn't help but think that if the movie just had someone with better screen presence it would have been much more enjoyable. Once they crossed over into the Shimmer I became really bored with her. She just lacks that special something, that charm/magnetism, needed. I actually liked the supporting cast quite a bit, but Portman was just dull. The entire scene in the lighthouse just felt so lame- especially the fight with the Mimic (I assume that's the creature you guys are referring to as the Mimic). I'm not expecting an action movie fight sequence, but there just wasn't any tension. Watching her "interact" with the creature, it really stood out to me that she (like a lot of actors) is really uncomfortable with a green screen. IMO, the whole scene was critically flawed as that much GCI took me right out of the confrontation. Up till that point I thought the visuals had been great, but the lighthouse scene made the mistake of "showing too much." That's not necessarily Portman's fault, but she also didn't do anything to help the scene. The only scene where she showed me anything was when she was screaming for Shepard. Otherwise I badly wanted someone with some screen charm. Overall, I'd give the books a try because it sounds like there's a lot there. The movie, however, I will probably forget almost everything about by the weekend.
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Mar 6, 2018 06:00
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conventionalcat posted:this movie was absolutely 100% perfect. that is all 
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Mar 6, 2018 06:55
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I really liked Portman's performance. Gina Rodriguez and Jennifer Jason Leigh may do a better job but in general it was a lot of strong acting. I didn't really see that part of the finale as a 'fight' in a conventional sense, except briefly.
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Mar 6, 2018 07:04
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Saw the movie, then read the books. I agree that the movie made a lot of very smart changes to the books. The cancer analogy that the movie used was really helpful, as a viewer, to understand a "rule" of the Shimmer and build tension. The book Area X doesn't work like that, but it made the movie's Area X more coherent. The theme of self-destruction is another good new addition and the character changes made based on that worked. Playing into some horror-movie tropes worked for me too. Book spoilers! Alright, I didn't love them. Vandermeer had a lot of good ideas and creepy images, but I ended up hating pretty much every PoV character, the hypnosis, the first 3/4 of Authority, etc. The book's world-building never really establishes a whole lot of rules about how Area X operated. Which is fine... but as a result, I never felt that any characters were in danger because it was never predictable, especially once the biologist's clone became an all-knowing girl scout. Control bumbles around complaining about how little he knows and how mysterious the zone was and how out of their depth he feels. I guess the point of that was to underline human hubris in the face of the unknown but it reallly grated, especially in Acceptance. The books also had a really annoying way of having PoV characters know things that aren't relayed to the reader which then gets paid off with another character revealing "Oh Character Y knew that all along! They were so smart and insightful!" long after it would have been relevant to share that information. Ghost Bird and the director's chapters were really bad for this. The book's biologist is a really oddly-written character throughout - like other reviewers noted, she doesn't really have human reactions at any point and instead of this making her a psycho, it makes her Biggest Hero (literally at the end lol). She's meant to be a camera for the reader to experience Area X through and not meant to be likeable but he did too good a job, I was pretty sick of her poo poo when she justified killing the surveyor. I have a HUGE problem with hypnosis as a plot device in these books, and OK I get that it's to contrast human control vs. the control Area X exerts. Fine. But removing that agency from your characters makes them far less interesting. Blinding the first book's characters to the tower's appearance removes the opportunity for interesting character reactions and interactions to it. Knowing that Control is being hosed with makes his chapters tooooorture to get through as he fails to notice what readers pick up on after his first phone call. He investigates pretty much nothing that matters to the story until the last quarter of the book, ignores Whitby's obvious crazy poo poo, fails to put pieces together, and instead it's FBI Ken vs. Grace and we don't care about that when there's alien poo poo happening! I hate it as a plot device - there's way more interesting ways to have characters act against their best interests. And nothing especially clever is done with it in the trilogy. quote:So did they just reuse the set for the house? That was Kane's house, too, and he'd been in Area X for a while. Inanimate stuff like tats can transfer, so the zone might have transformed a building to match an occupant's memory. Movie was good. Not best of the year, but a nice thoughtful sci-fi injection with a tense third act and a great change from like 300 Marvel movies I'm so so sick of them.
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Mar 6, 2018 22:35
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Atma McCuddles posted:-lots o stuff- Yeah, I agree with a lot of what you are saying. I did really enjoy the movie and I always want to support trippy scifi just so more gets made. When did the tattoos start appearing on the characters? I don't think the paramedic had it initially, but she did by the halfway point at least. Book spoilers Hypnosis is such a lazy plot device. It always feels like a cop out on the author's part to me. "I need this character to do something but I don't want to actually develop motivation for it. Ok, they are hypnotized." There are missed opportunities and issues with the movie for sure, but there are a ton in the books imo.
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Mar 7, 2018 04:11
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The movie pivoted in the best possible way when ventress vomits stars and lights and poo poo
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Mar 7, 2018 04:44
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SpitztheGreat posted:I'm not expecting an action movie fight sequence, but there just wasn't any tension. Watching her "interact" with the creature, it really stood out to me that she (like a lot of actors) is really uncomfortable with a green screen. Hey she spent tons of time around green screens in the Star Wars prequels.
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Mar 7, 2018 07:16
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Pretty sure that was an actor in a suit not CGI
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Mar 7, 2018 07:22
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I enjoyed the movie so I read through the first book and found myself preferring the movie. Is it still worth reading books 2 and 3?
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Mar 7, 2018 08:04
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Maneki Neko posted:I enjoyed the movie so I read through the first book and found myself preferring the movie. Is it still worth reading books 2 and 3? The second is the best in the series and the third is the worst, but has fairly overt conclusions to most of the mysteries.
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Mar 7, 2018 13:32
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Danger posted:The second is the best in the series and the third is the worst, but has fairly overt conclusions to most of the mysteries. Yeah I remember reading them 2 years back and I remember everything that happens in the first and second books, but I only remember parts of the third because it was pretty inconsistent in quality. I would have preferred it if the third book had changed the weight of the narrative focus from control and ghost bird and grace to the lighthouse keeper. I think there's a novella covering more of the events leading up to the establishment of area x coming out this year though, since Vandermeer is writing it at the moment; hopefully there'll be more of him because he was one of my favorite characters from the series. Edit: Actually apparently Vandermeer is writing two novellas/maybe short novels set in area x, not one. One is from the perspective of the first expedition, and another one is set a year before the establishment of area x. Both are exciting because from what I remember from the second book the first expedition was even more of a mindfuck than the 12th. A Spherical Sponge fucked around with this message at 15:52 on Mar 7, 2018 |
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Mar 7, 2018 15:40
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I think what gets to me about the modern Villeneuve/Garland/whoever Cerebral SF film is the way they’ve turned Kubrick’s precise visuals and alienating dialogue into this sort of rote form. Does someone in Annihilation answer a question with “Does it matter?” I don’t remember, but probably! Does Natalie Portman look sadly past the camera while failing to make emotional connections? Probably. There’s just this...neatness to all of it, this clinical precision of effect, which I find kind of anodyne. Do I make any sense? Probably not. But in the movie, right, remember how we see Kain come home? It’s siper creepy and there’s even some fantastic Face Acting by Portman. But it’s all framed in this very cold sterile house and it’s mostly Portman bouncing off Isaac. Compare to the book - quote:But how could I not be affected by Area X, if only through him? One night, about a year after he had headed for the border, as I lay alone in bed, I heard someone in the kitchen. Armed with a baseball bat, I left the bedroom and turned on all the lights in the house. I found my husband next to the refrigerator, still dressed in his expedition clothes, drinking milk until it flowed down his chin and neck. Eating leftovers furiously. Yeah, it’s kind of slapstick, but it’s sort of more organic, too, and not just in the literal sense of milk spilling everywhere. It’s a blocking I find more interesting than detached stares. I dunno. I feel like I’m not articulating this well.
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Mar 8, 2018 03:22
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So I haven’t seen the film yet, but was intrigued enough that I bought the audiobook, which I just finished. First off, drat it’s short. Second, drat it’s disappointing. I haven’t read spoilers, but the book was not riveting at all, and I’m bummed because the trailers for the movie really made me excited. I’ll still watch it, but I’m much less jazzed about it now. Also, nothing against the book itself, but the narrator of the audiobook gave one of the worst performances I’ve ever heard. Maybe the worse.
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Mar 10, 2018 03:11
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eyebeem posted:So I haven’t seen the film yet, but was intrigued enough that I bought the audiobook, which I just finished. I’d imagine it’s a tough voice to find, as the narrator is intentionally stiff and odd. Even written it still comes across as offputting, but it works for the story as it progresses.
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Mar 10, 2018 03:51
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Was I just mishearing or was the immolating Kane in the video speaking in a southern accent? Maybe it was just the way Oscar Isaac was speaking as someone coming apart mentally but my first thought was that the real Kane had an accent that the one in the flashbacks didn't have. I interpreted this as just another way that Area X messes with people by even altering some of Lena's memories but maybe I completely misheard and it's not actually anything.
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Mar 10, 2018 17:14
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Flying Zamboni posted:Was I just mishearing or was the immolating Kane in the video speaking in a southern accent? Maybe it was just the way Oscar Isaac was speaking as someone coming apart mentally but my first thought was that the real Kane had an accent that the one in the flashbacks didn't have. I interpreted this as just another way that Area X messes with people by even altering some of Lena's memories but maybe I completely misheard and it's not actually anything. Other way around, I think. He'd picked up someone else's southern accent, which fits with him commenting about how he wasn't Kane anymore right before lighting himself up.
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Mar 10, 2018 17:54
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General Battuta posted:I think what gets to me about the modern Villeneuve/Garland/whoever Cerebral SF film is the way they’ve turned Kubrick’s precise visuals and alienating dialogue into this sort of rote form. Does someone in Annihilation answer a question with “Does it matter?” I don’t remember, but probably! Does Natalie Portman look sadly past the camera while failing to make emotional connections? Probably. There’s just this...neatness to all of it, this clinical precision of effect, which I find kind of anodyne. I do get that feeling about the modern cerebral SF film in general, but I feel like this film managed to transcend that just in how messy and freaky it gets in the end. There were definitely times it felt more Cronenberg than Kubrick and that's a filmmaker who knows how to put flesh over ideas.
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Mar 10, 2018 19:37
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eyebeem posted:So I haven’t seen the film yet, but was intrigued enough that I bought the audiobook, which I just finished. Definitely for the worse. Vandermeer describes Area X in pretty extreme detail in the book. I frequently would put it down, think about what I had read to picture it, then move on. If I were listening to it I think it would have just been a bunch of word salad.
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Mar 10, 2018 19:52
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Sock The Great posted:Definitely for the worse. Vandermeer describes Area X in pretty extreme detail in the book. I frequently would put it down, think about what I had read to picture it, then move on. I never really thought about it but yeah, some novels don't translate as well to audiobook format as well as others. There's a bit in Demolished Man where a bunch of telepaths are playing elaborate games with word images and I don't know if you could render that at all in a purely aural medium. There's probably an audiobook of Naked Lunch and I wonder what that sounds like.
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Mar 11, 2018 00:07
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Maxwell Lord posted:
It's great but not the best book to have blaring from your car at a stoplight.
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Mar 11, 2018 00:39
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:He really loves expository dialog but doesn't seem to love making any of it interesting. All his directorial work is at its best when no one is talking. Does he get some of his own stuff going in this one visually or is it a decent Danny Boyle impression like Ex Machina
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Mar 11, 2018 04:05
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This movie completely ripped off Alzabo.
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Mar 11, 2018 05:45
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When alien Kane goes back to the house, why was he wearing the clothes he left the house in rather than the military garb the on-camera clone was wearing? Do the clones get to morph their bodies like T1000 at will or did he stop by Dillard's on the way there?
Unzip and Attack fucked around with this message at 07:27 on Mar 11, 2018 |
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Mar 11, 2018 07:15
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Better spoiler that one friendo
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Mar 11, 2018 07:23
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Unzip and Attack posted:When alien Kane goes back to the house, why was he wearing the clothes he left the house in rather than the military garb the on-camera clone was wearing? Do the clones get to morph their bodies like T1000 at will or did he stop by Dillard's on the way there? Because the dna of his clothes mixed with the dna of the clothes of the people he passed on the way home
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Mar 11, 2018 07:29
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Steve Yun posted:Because the dna of his clothes mixed with the dna of the clothes of the people he passed on the way home And happened to be the exact clothes he wore on the day he left for the mission (Black shirt, black jacket, tan slacks)? That seems...unlikely. E: Haha I'm dumb. VVV Unzip and Attack fucked around with this message at 08:01 on Mar 11, 2018 |
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Mar 11, 2018 07:47
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lol my dude he’s loving with you clothes don’t have DNA
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Mar 11, 2018 07:56
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General Battuta posted:lol my dude he’s loving with you clothes don’t have DNA Monica Lewinski might disagree with you.
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Mar 11, 2018 08:46
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The best part of seeing this movie in a sold out theater was the palpable confusion that permeated the room when the credits rolled. There were several audible mumurs.
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Mar 11, 2018 19:41
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I saw it the day after opening and I guess I got lucky, but theater of people I saw it with seemed to like it and 60% of them even sat through the credits.
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Mar 11, 2018 22:57
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Just saw it going in with full spoilers and plot details and I'd give it a 7/10
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Mar 11, 2018 23:14
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I liked this a lot but is it just me or is the quality on netflix loving awful for this movie in particular?
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Mar 12, 2018 13:38
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Tgent posted:I liked this a lot but is it just me or is the quality on netflix loving awful for this movie in particular? I’m guessing the weird prism effect doesn’t compress well for streaming?
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Mar 12, 2018 15:50
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gently caress Paramount for selling the international rights to Netflix. The third act deserves to be seen on the biggest screen with the loudest imaginable sound.
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Mar 12, 2018 15:55
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This creeped me out more than any other scifi movie I have seen. There is a realness to it that sells the horror of such alien strangeness. I've never been scared of alien stuff before, but the nature of this thing as a sort of diseased environment made it connect. There are some flaws, but it was very successful in unsettling me.
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Mar 12, 2018 17:11
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Tgent posted:I liked this a lot but is it just me or is the quality on netflix loving awful for this movie in particular? https://twitter.com/jetfury/status/973096357828399105?s=21
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Mar 12, 2018 18:19
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SpitztheGreat posted:I'm genuinely surprised for the love this moving is getting here. In my personal opinion I thought it was at best a 6/10. I went into this movie cold, knew almost nothing about it, and left thinking that there was a tremendous amount of wasted potential. As others have said, I thought the tone of the movie was very confused and that it never really settled on what it wanted to be. After reading some of the backstory I see that assessment was correct. agree it was weird, it was kind of interesting, the acting was pretty meh all around, but in my mind the biggest flaws are showing how the clones are 'made' and it missed out on some of the coolest poo poo from the book.
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Mar 12, 2018 20:45
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I did not like this movie. That being said, there were some genuinely creepy as gently caress moments. The reveal of the dead soldier's body on the wall was one of the most visually arresting images I have ever seen. And the zombie bear with a woman's voice. Holy poo poo Had these been components of a much better movie, they'd become classic movie moments ala the chest-buster, face hugger, etc.
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Mar 12, 2018 20:52
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Tgent posted:I liked this a lot but is it just me or is the quality on netflix loving awful for this movie in particular? It is only streaming in some kind of sub-480p or whatever quality for me for some weird reason and it looks terrible. Everything else on Netflix is fine.
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Mar 12, 2018 20:55
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Unzip and Attack posted:The reveal of the dead soldier's body on the wall was one of the most visually arresting images I have ever seen. And the zombie bear with a woman's voice. Holy poo poo Super loving disappointing because you're right visually there was some really great stuff its too bad it didn't pull together into an actual good experience. this has to be one of my biggest movie let downs ever.
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Mar 12, 2018 21:01
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