criterionforum.org

badass chicks shooting mutant gators in the face

Persona wrote:Funny because I was watching The Ritual last night and had the exact opposite thought. Though I will give massive props to that creature design in The Ritual.

Sorry you didn't get that much out of Annihilation, I think there is quite a bit of thematic depth to the movie but that's largely dependent on how much you're willing (or how much the film makes you willing) to engage with it. I can only recommend again the reviews on Film Freak Central and New Republic and the piece on Vulture by Angelica Bastien about the film's depiction of the linkage between depression and self-destruction. And some of those themes go part of the way to explaining some of the characters' "stupidity," as you call it.

At first I also thought the Stalker comparison was a superficial one based on some premise and location shooting similarities, but Chaw's review for Film Freak made me question my initial reaction. Yes, they are utterly different movies, Annihilation is very much more a genre flick than an art film, but there is more thematic overlap than I was giving credit for. Also found the connections that Chaw and the New Republic piece drew to Virginia Woolf to be fascinating.

I thought the filmmaking was, in general, top-notch--particularly the work from the art and sound design, camera, and editing teams--and it really shone as a work of craft on the big screen, but maybe my opinion will diminish slightly on that front on home viewing.

Persona wrote:When he wrote the script he said he intentionally didn't re-read the book, because it felt like a dream to him and he wanted to do his script as a sort of "dream response" to the story. And for better or worse, that comes through in the movie. (For better, in my case).

barryconvex wrote: Tue May 22, 2018 7:08 amSo, i'll just say Garland needs to be recognized as a major talent.

domino wrote: Even the final shot is meaningless-- the Lady or the Tiger doesn't work if either option has the same dramatic heft.

Mr Sausage wrote: Fri Sep 21, 2018 10:39 am

domino wrote: Even the final shot is meaningless-- the Lady or the Tiger doesn't work if either option has the same dramatic heft.

All your criticisms are fair, but I assumed the point at the end was precisely that it didn't matter which was the case. It's the conclusion to the idea raised in Area X that identity is incoherent if borders are porous: the characters have abandoned the idea that authenticity requires a purity of identity. The movie seems to be siding with the idea that authentic emotional experience is still possible within what are considered inauthentic worlds, ie. simulations. If it doesn't matter to Portman's character that her husband's a simulation, we can assume it doesn't matter to her if she is one as well. So the meaning is contained in the gesture rather than the ambiguity itself. The ambiguity is more like context.

Not that any of this ought to make you like the movie better. It's just how I understood it leaving the theatre.

Mr Sausage wrote: Fri Sep 21, 2018 10:39 am

domino wrote: Even the final shot is meaningless-- the Lady or the Tiger doesn't work if either option has the same dramatic heft.

All your criticisms are fair, but I assumed the point at the end was precisely that it didn't matter which was the case. It's the conclusion to the idea raised in Area X that identity is incoherent if borders are porous: the characters have abandoned the idea that authenticity requires a purity of identity. The movie seems to be siding with the idea that authentic emotional experience is still possible within what are considered inauthentic worlds, ie. simulations.

domino wrote:Perhaps this is one of the reasons I didn’t get much out of this film, as treating identity as an amorphous and irrelevant status may be true in a cold biological perspective, but it’s forgoing the very thing that makes us and our shared human experience interesting and worth study. I can see how the film would encourage this reading, but I think there are a lot of missed opportunities here to either delve deeper into the fluidity of identity via the mutations or go harder into the look at the unfeeling forces of nature— I could see a version of this film working from a Microcosmos perspective, but once we’re given humans to follow, even archetypes, that becomes harder because we’re trained as an audience to identify with and/or recognize characters and we will attach meaning to what we see regardless of what nature provides.

domino wrote:As far as emotion, I find this argument far less convincing. I think the film has a hostile treatment of emotion, perhaps in order to make the eventual point you suggest, but all emotional responses in the film seem like sterile imitations of actual emotion: Portman is defined by grief, but this only manifests in being outwardly aloof and distant and we know nothing about her other than her job and some poor pillow talk; the members of the crew are all self-destructive due to preexistent circumstances, but there’s no real differentiation in their actions that is informed by this (a suicidal character’s willful act of giving up is hardly insight, especially since the entire crew shares her basic defeatism). The mother who lost a daughter is the most friendly (ie matronly) to Portman, which I’d invest more in reading as a larger statement about how the film treats emotions if I weren’t convinced this was only done because the film

Spoiler

intends to kill her off first— show of hands, who didn’t know immediately once she started talking in the rowboat that she’d be the first to bite it, since she’s the only one setting up conventional (knowable) character beats? I like audience manipulation as much as anyone when it’s done well. This was too transparent.

In the end, I don’t think Portman has anything resembling an emotional response to her husband, interrogators, or alien-self. A better film could exploit this, but based on the two films he’s directed, I’m not convinced Garland is interested in humanity as any kind of tangible theme or perspective, instead treating it as an abstract notion (not unlike how the Portman double undoubtedly would). That’s a lot more interesting in theory than it winds up being in practice here and in Ex Machina, though.

Mr Sausage wrote: Sat Sep 22, 2018 10:59 am

domino wrote:Perhaps this is one of the reasons I didn’t get much out of this film, as treating identity as an amorphous and irrelevant status may be true in a cold biological perspective, but it’s forgoing the very thing that makes us and our shared human experience interesting and worth study. I can see how the film would encourage this reading, but I think there are a lot of missed opportunities here to either delve deeper into the fluidity of identity via the mutations or go harder into the look at the unfeeling forces of nature— I could see a version of this film working from a Microcosmos perspective, but once we’re given humans to follow, even archetypes, that becomes harder because we’re trained as an audience to identify with and/or recognize characters and we will attach meaning to what we see regardless of what nature provides.

I'm not sure it's treating identity as irrelevant in the way you say. I think it's more about what remains relevant when our existing categories of identity cease to structure our cognitive world in any meaningful way. Ex Machina was dealing with the same thing: what does it mean to be human if non-human products have all our distinguishing features. Annihilation takes that a step further and not only provides simulated people replacing real people, but has characters absorb bits of each other's identities. This breakdown of our mental categories can go two ways: towards apocalypse ala Werkmeister Harmonies, or in Annihilation's case towards acceptance (also the name of the final book in the series). There are characters who resist refraction and duplication and kill themselves, but the film seems more on the side of those who embrace their change in identity, including Portman, who does burn down Area X, but in the end also seems accepting of its products, of which she may be one. Her interrogation and her actions the very end of the film do suggest something has been reframed for her. But I don't get the sense the film is hostile to identity. I think it's taking a view of it commonly held by transhumanists and those who believe in the coming singularity: that we're going to have to reframe our categories of identity and their potential for meaningful action once advances in technology or understanding make it unavoidably the case that our categories are outdated folk taxonomies. This is not hostility, just an understanding that our categories were established when we knew only so much. Annihilation is poking its head into these themes, but through the lense of alien intervention rather than human technological breakthrough ala Ex Machina.

I agree completely about the missed opportunity to dive more deeply into identity, but then this is a two-hour effects driven blockbuster more than a 3-hour Tarkovsky meditation, and we already have Stalker. So I guess I'm not overly disappointed by its relative shallowness.

domino wrote:As far as emotion, I find this argument far less convincing. I think the film has a hostile treatment of emotion, perhaps in order to make the eventual point you suggest, but all emotional responses in the film seem like sterile imitations of actual emotion: Portman is defined by grief, but this only manifests in being outwardly aloof and distant and we know nothing about her other than her job and some poor pillow talk; the members of the crew are all self-destructive due to preexistent circumstances, but there’s no real differentiation in their actions that is informed by this (a suicidal character’s willful act of giving up is hardly insight, especially since the entire crew shares her basic defeatism). The mother who lost a daughter is the most friendly (ie matronly) to Portman, which I’d invest more in reading as a larger statement about how the film treats emotions if I weren’t convinced this was only done because the film

Spoiler

intends to kill her off first— show of hands, who didn’t know immediately once she started talking in the rowboat that she’d be the first to bite it, since she’s the only one setting up conventional (knowable) character beats? I like audience manipulation as much as anyone when it’s done well. This was too transparent.

In the end, I don’t think Portman has anything resembling an emotional response to her husband, interrogators, or alien-self. A better film could exploit this, but based on the two films he’s directed, I’m not convinced Garland is interested in humanity as any kind of tangible theme or perspective, instead treating it as an abstract notion (not unlike how the Portman double undoubtedly would). That’s a lot more interesting in theory than it winds up being in practice here and in Ex Machina, though.

I think we'd agree that the film is more about emotion than containing it. Its tone is distant and frigid, no doubt to create unease as much as anything. But I do think that gesture at the end is an affirmation, in this case of the authenticity of emotional experience as experience, including the experience of beings of dubious authenticity. But I agree: this is handled in the abstract, as an intellectual problem, and not as a dramatic situation. The Domhall Gleason episode of Black Mirror is a far more incisive and moving account of the emotions of being confronted with simulated beings than either Annihilation or Ex Machina. But much as Ex Machina was using the frame of the turing test to suggest the authenticity of the emotional experiences of its robot, the refracted identities in Annihilation do culminate in the only gesture in the film of human need for another, however muted. Whether Oscar Isaac is her husband or her husband, or if she is herself or what, she does make a gesture of wanting and needing him, and I can't help feeling it's an analogy to the troubling but authentic gesture of defiance at the end of Ex Machina. But Annihilation is observing all this rather than feeling it, and doesn't intend us to share the experience (and maybe even wants us to be frightened of it in a small way). And I would agree that overall this concept is not explored with the depth it could've been.