Directed by:
Alex GarlandScreenplay:
Alex GarlandCinematography:
Rob HardyCast:
Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Oscar Isaac, Tessa Thompson, Gina Rodriguez, Tuva Novotny, Benedict Wong, David Gyasi, Sonoya Mizuno, Cosmo Jarvis (more)VOD (3)
Plots(1)
Biologist and former soldier Lena (Natalie Portman) is shocked when her missing husband (Oscar Isaac) comes home near death from a top-secret mission into The Shimmer, a mysterious quarantine zone no one has ever returned from. Now, Lena and her elite team must enter a beautiful, deadly world of mutated landscapes and creatures, to discover how to stop the growing phenomenon that threatens all life on Earth. (Paramount Pictures)
(more)Videos (13)
Reviews (16)
It’s great that Netflix, as part of its sci-fi mission, shoots stories that are part of the current new weird novel trend. I actually discovered the author of the source novel – Jeff VanderMeer a few months ago in the form of his book Veniss Underground and I was fascinated by his brutal surrealism. In case of Annihilation, it’s not that obvious but still similar. Had Giger been still alive and participated in the creation of this movie like he did in the case of Alien, it might have been a unique work. It’s still quite decent as it is, though. I was ecstatic even though I’d have appreciated more visual ideas in that bubble.
()
A pure and, in places, really terrifying horror with an inconclusive ending. The hypnotic atmosphere of the survey mutating the national park is perhaps disrupted a little inter by the memory sequences, but they are important too. Garland cleverly layers a story full of memory holes and, through hints, sets the scene for a mind-fuck finale, which deserves deeper analysis, not so much of what happened, but more like why. The tricks are sufficient, even if a little unbalanced. The overall visual is just wow. The human trees, moldy bodies and all the other mutants serve to advance the story. The acting was flawless, with Isaac being the most intriguing of all. Another great job after Ex Machina.
()
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.
()
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.
()
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.
()
Ads