Yeah, I felt few things while watching it and felt nothing leaving the theater, a few scares, a few creepy moments. The ending is very weird, but It probably should've went further into the crazy.

I would call it "a good film" only because I would like to watch it again.

That Lindsey Romaim tweet reads like a parody.

I enjoyed it. Random thoughts:
1) There was a trailor for Rampage before the film, which I ended up thinking about when seeing similar mutated creatures in the film.
2) I didn't buy Jane the Virgin as a badass for a second.
3) The film looked marvelous, the world in the Shimmer reminded me of the world of Avatar. I preferred the world of Annihilation.
4) Amadala and Poe make a better couple than Amadala and Anakin.
5) I appreciated that it was telling a different story from the book, I'm not sure the book could be captured. But... the books were better.
6) For instance, the jump scares in the movie are no where near as frightening as the discovery of the journals in the book.
7) I don't understand the comparisons to Event Horizon because this film made, you know, sense.
8) Some of the dialouge was really clunky.
9) The filmmakers seemed to think the ending was more clever than it was, but it still worked.
10) It was trying to do something different. That should not be discouraged.

I like Natalie, I like weird sci-fi, I like thrillers where teams of explorers fall into a dark abyss. Strangely, I didn't get as much out of Annihilation as I hoped. Limp setup, plodding midsection. Even with all the scary monsters and atmospheric oddity, there were a few points when I was on the verge of nodding off. The ending definitely made me perk up. I never felt like it hit its stride until that home stretch, when it abandoned all pretense of accessibility to shopping mall audiences. mother! for all of its faults at least had confident commitment to avant-garde lunacy from beginning to end. Paramount is cool for releasing both films six months apart.

Question of the day: Why hasn't Natalie Portman ever become the major movie star everyone expected?

Because she has been miscast in almost everything since Garden State. The Jackie Kennedy play was a travesty. And Black Swan is a terrible performance — overblown, gestural, and way too on the nose. It’s like she thinks she’s Meryl Streep when she’s actually closer to Natalie Wood.

She's great in the Malicks that she's done. I would say she's actually among the actors who gets what he's doing the most and can tune her performances accordingly.

She's fantastic in Jim Sheridan's BROTHERS. Bang-on about the awful BLACK SWAN, though.

Black Swan not withstanding, I remain unconvinced that she's worth a damn. She seems to have gotten a pass for two decades of incapable performances thanks largely to two groups: Creeps who have maintained a crush since The Professional, and journalists who admire her Lefty Who Went To Harvard status. She's really just Jennifer Garner with pretensions.

Heads and shoulders the best movie of 2018 so far. And I see nothing on the horizon that shall take that crown.

Paddington 2!

I liked it a lot, but dare I say it was the tiniest bit twee?

Spoilers lurk: Was intrigued by the first 10 minutes, definitely on board with Jennifer Jason Leigh as the hard bitten apparatchik who's already given in to the inevitable — a brilliant bit of casting. But then after the all-girl team enters the shimmer the film is surprisingly flat and predictable. The returns to her interrogation by the hazmat guys is creaky and the seams really start to show. The war movie trope of a squad of disparate characters each haunted by some failing or tragedy is mixed with toothy, jump scare monsters and standard in-the-face bellowing (just getting hit by that blast of bad breath would probably be fatal). For a place that's supposed to be ultra-freaky, the shimmer is essentially some explosions of pretty flowers and tiny white deer. The score's soulful guitar notes undercut any freakiness. A major letdown. But the final 20 minutes rescues the movie. It is unrelenting CGI, but some wildly imaginative CGI with forcefully weird sound design to support it. Also, loved the Yves Tanguy mirror figure that Portman confronts. The concept of alien runaway DNA from Vandermeer's novel is different from Roadside Picnic and Stalker in that this alien presence is relentlessly terraforming the planet for its own use. The Strugatsky idea is that aliens visit, then depart, leaving zones of unexplained enigmatic objects and bizarre physics.

These critics today don't know a thing about movies. Under the Skin? Arrival? Tree of Life? Solaris? Bullshit. It's John Frankenheimer's (back when he was reallyy boozing) 1979 travesty Prophecy. Case evidence No. 1

https://www.youtube.com/wat...

https://www.youtube.com/wat...

And people are accusing Guillermo del Toro of plagiarism? That thing's virtually Annihilation in a nutshell!

If I had to pick one word to describe ANNIHILATION it would be "lugubrious." The writing was pedestrian, the overall mood one of despair. And worst of all, the pacing was somnolent to the point I never felt the slightest sense of dread that cartwheel critics have lavished on it. As for the so-called "mind-blowing" finale, are you kidding me? I was underwhelmed. To call this a masterpiece, and place it in the same realm as 2001, or a sci-fi HEART OF DARKNESS/APOCALYPSE NOW is critical leniency. It wasn't bad, by any means, certainly not the sort of claptrap that THE FOUNTAIN was, but the trailer portended something that the film itself sorely lacked, for all its blurred thematic pretension about self-destruction - honest to goodness tension and suspense. I'd say you were pretty accurate about this one Jeff.

Up-vote for "lugubrious."

Anytime someone writes "this movie isn't for everyone" or "this movie won't be for everyone" I ignore everything that person has to say for perpetuity. Laziest fucking cop-out ever.

Joe and Jane's reviews on the
moviePasss blog are the most confusing since Phantom Thread.

I love all the touchstones people are comparing this to, and I was an admirer of Ex Machina. But this movie is a piece of shit. Garland thinks he’s making STALKER, but he’s really making EVENT HORIZON. And worst of all Natalie Portman doesn’t know what she’s making. You can partly blame the (leaden, thumpingly on the nose) writing or the clumsy mismanagement of tone directorially — but this is a very bad performance. The contrivances and convenient claptrap shoehorned in to justify her inclusion on the team and instant assumption of a leadership role go further than stretching credibility — they have all the earmarks of a fumbling rewrite aimed at turning this genre picture into a star vehicle. The result is a schlocky b-movie that gives off constant waves of movie star vanity project. Incidentally Jennifer Jason Leigh is usually great in anything and she stinks in this too. So it may be a fault of the filmmaking. This feels like a career ender to me. How on earth it got good notices is baffling. There isn’t one good scene in the first 45 minutes.

Okay, the CSN needledrop was cute. And I like how they woke up in the shimmer disoriented. But those are two grace notes surrounded by a lot of tuneless noise. I walked out!

Nah, Alex Garland already remade Event Horizon. It was called Sunshine.

I wasn’t blown away by Event Horizon. I recognized it for the genre crap it was. It’s debatable whether Anniliation belongs in the company of Stalker and 2001 but it’s not dreck as you describe.

Event Horizon is an umitigated piece of garbage. Sam Neill really must have needed that check.

Sorry, Jeff, you're wrong on this one. I believe you said recently this was all about CGI and horror and it is nothing about either of those things. What it is, however, is probably the best movie of 2018 so far. I wasn't "bothered" by a minute of it but I was engrossed for 109 of them. For you to roundly dismiss such a thoughtful film about the human propensity for self-destruction, and one that is so bold and conceptually daring, is bizarre to say the least. You should equally dismiss, you know, mother!, as well then.

Well it’s a little about the CGI. The visuals under the lighthouse are completely fantastic.

https://uploads.disquscdn.c...

even without peaches?

Why should people be bothered by it if it is their cup of tea? If it really reminds of Stalker, Solaris, 2001, Tree of Life, etc., it's running in pretty good company, as far as I'm concerned.

Yeah it's amazing how anti-art critics can be when it's not their preferred variety of art.

Its the most psychedelic divorce movie i've ever seen. I think the main "problem" (if you want to call it that) is that it is perfectly content to throw ideas up in the air, and doesn't bother with trying to synthesize them into a greater whole. Even if its "only" a near great movie, i'd rather see 100 movies with this kind of ambition at the multiplex, instead of sitting thru more fighting robot/superhero/fan boy flicks. Plus, excellent music score.

Yeah I love Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury's scoring. I hadn't realized someone had picked them up as composers until I looked up who did this film's score.

Actually been a fan of Barrow's for a long time, since the first Portishead album. When he and Salisbury released their Mega One City faux-soundtrack album I thought it a shame they weren't scoring real movies, and then here I saw they did this and the score to Ex Machina.

Alex Garland(who produced and wrote Dredd) must've heard their Mega City One album.

I didn't realize it was them either. I don't want to oversell it; there's quite a bit of drone-y, drawn out stuff that might turn off some film music fans who would like something more immediate. But, its good stuff. I'm not even sure how you would describe it? Brian Eno covers Sunn-O with stronger theme variations and choral sequences?

zimmer much?

Nothing at all alike. Only similarity is both SF. Arrival is a far better movie.

I sure hope it's nothing like Arrival II. https://uploads.disquscdn.c...

Beat me to it!

I hated Arrival and loved this one. I can see the comparison but the execution is leagues above imo.

Arrival’s first hour is riveting. And its ending is genuinely mind bending, imaginative, and emotional. I didn’t think it was the masterpiece some did, but it’s certainly a good picture with some brilliant sequences.

The execs who greenlit this hoped they had an arrival on their hands. They didn’t. And they don’t.

Closest movie I can compare it to is Under The Skin but less artsy and off-putting(nobody get me wrong, I liked that movie a lot).

Thoroughly in the tank for Under the Skin and think the off-putting part was Glazer brilliantly conveying the alien sensibility.

I think we learned from Last Jedi that the matrix scoring on Metacritic and RT has rendered the score almost meaningless. It is a bit of paradox, you would think that these sites would be a good thing for critics, but in actuality it has become the reverse, the negative averages and the high averages both make the critics look unanimously out of touch with reality or moderation. The positive scores for Last Jedi were off the charts hyperbolic nonsense.

I don't think the problem was the algorithm. I think the problem was the critics.

largely true, but there is a large amount of interpretation in reading a review and assigning a number to it

Yet they were true.

nope

I ended my B- review with this:

"Garland could have benefited from having a more interesting central character than Lena, whose personal life, a tumultuous marriage, a secret affair, is revealed to us over a series of flashbacks that feel too pat and obvious to make you care about this clearly troubled human being. That, in essence, turns out to be the film's handicap. Despite the beautiful aesthetics and the gloomy, visionary ambitions, "Annihilation" feels empty inside"

Complete disagreement.

Had Garland used the material about their marriage from the book, "Lena" would have been much better drawn.