Movie of the Month - Annihilation (June 2018)
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If it had more character development and better music, it would be one of the greatest films ever made.
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I have th rewatched it since it’s opening day in theaters, but I remember really really liking it. There’s a lot to it to unpack, so I’ll hold off on my full thoughts until I get to see it again.
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That's a tad harsh. There are some legitimate critiques in the podcast, none of which are eschewing intellectualism (to the contrary, we usually over-intellectualize the stuff we talk about 
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I suppose there are people who will write it off as weird because it doesn't follow the usual script, but there's some odd choices in there even if you don't do that. And the flip-side phenomenon, of course, is that some people like anything weird or audacious even if it's narratively or intellectually messy. For every dude who adores every Marvel movie there's a film student who thinks anything sufficiently different is ipso facto genius.
If you look back a bit there's some talk earlier in this thread (and in our Eyes Wide Shut podcast) about Kubrick and the way dealing in certain themes with sufficient technical style can lead a lot of people to read genius into ambiguity.
).I suppose there are people who will write it off as weird because it doesn't follow the usual script, but there's some odd choices in there even if you don't do that. And the flip-side phenomenon, of course, is that some people like anything weird or audacious even if it's narratively or intellectually messy. For every dude who adores every Marvel movie there's a film student who thinks anything sufficiently different is ipso facto genius.
If you look back a bit there's some talk earlier in this thread (and in our Eyes Wide Shut podcast) about Kubrick and the way dealing in certain themes with sufficient technical style can lead a lot of people to read genius into ambiguity.
I mean as mentioned the obvious comparison here is Tarkovsky's Stalker yet to me theres a clear difference between the weight of that film as this one throwing out weirdness for its own sake. To me it just felt like a director who's certainly not without talent biting off more than he could chew. I actually think the film would have been better off taking a more conventional route in terms of narrative akin to Ex Machina. More an X-files monster of the week style film mixed in with a tragic romance.
Either that or it should have been re written and directed by Jonathan Glazer.
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Hard to find time sometimes! And in this case couldn't get one in before traveling around Labor Day. Shouldn't be too long until we record another, though, we average one every few months.
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Well, technically, it's the movie of whatever month we do it in. 
But yeah, I've been sorta-kinda changing it to just "Movie Club" here and there.
But yeah, I've been sorta-kinda changing it to just "Movie Club" here and there.
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It is a good sci-fi thriller that holds you till the end. Sometimes the movie looked half-baked but overall I found it worth watching full-time.
Please elaborate.
Please elaborate.
Well inside that buble like thing they was a lot of scientific processes, uncontrollable mutation, trees taking shapes of homosepians, plant and animal genes forming one species..,... just a lot of suff... Can't even talk about the bear that screams
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Guess I don't entirely follow the objection. Just saying it was too weird?
I was pretty enamored with the bear thing. Check out the podcast we just did on the film if you get a chance. We loved that part, but we're pretty fair/harsh on the film for some other things, as well.
I was pretty enamored with the bear thing. Check out the podcast we just did on the film if you get a chance. We loved that part, but we're pretty fair/harsh on the film for some other things, as well.
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The bear thing idea was nicked from Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun.
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"To me, it felt like bits of 2001 without any real symbolism, Arrival without any real progression or purpose, Into the Wild without any real wonder or curiosity, Solaris without any real visual awe, and Sphere without any real psychological self-awareness were all pulled from as inspiration without ever being put to use."
I thought the movie had considerable psychological self-awareness, especially since I've been watching a lot of psychology lectures in recent months. I'll have to watch Sphere again since I saw it a long time ago and can barely remember anything about it.
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Oh yeah? Please elaborate, I didn't know that.
In Wolfe's books you have the Alzabo, a extra-terrestrial monster of roughly bear/big cat size and shape that absorbs the personalities of the people it consumes for awhile. It will track down a victims family for example and speak to them with the family members voice/memories to try and lure them to it.
This perhaps isn't so specific but it uses the same kind of horror mechanism of having an animalistic predator speak with the voice of someone the characters know and how unsettling this is.
I would definitely agree that the film feels like its pulling influence from more ambitious works without really attempting as much. It would IMHO have been better of acknowledging that rather than trying to ride on an atmosphere of faux credibility, go for something more straight forward in terms of X-files body horror focusing more on scenes like the bear.
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