11/12/2022 0 Comments Aniquilation netfI can only imagine what it would have felt like to watch it on the big screen, but - and this is slightly bittersweet - only two countries in the world will get to see it ‘as it was intended’. The lighthouse takes a different meaning in the film adaptation of Annihilation. #Aniquilation netf movie#What was once a Lovecraftian story about grief, and coming to terms with loss, turns into a movie about guilt and the self-destructive tendencies of humanity. Garland also makes the excellent decision to ditch the novel’s non-linear structure in favour of more traditional, and more accessible one.īy changing VanderMeer’s novel significantly, Garland not only alters Lena’s motivations but also several central themes. Her motivations are clear and her pain is palpable. Lena, in the movie, as portrayed by Natalie Portman, is a much more well-rounded character - she even has a name, a common courtesy that was not afforded to her in the book. It’s rather dry, and extremely bare in its tone and descriptions, which makes it a difficult book to latch on to emotionally. But so are the changes he has made to Jeff VanderMeer’s source novel, which, I must confess, I am not particularly a fan of. While Annihilation’s third act transition - yes, there is one - hardly feels as drastic as the other times Garland has done it, it’s quite nutty in its own right. Similarly, 28 Days Later (also directed by Boyle) goes from being an existential zombie thriller to a surreal rape drama. Sunshine turns into a slasher movie for its final half hour, after being a meditative sci-fi film thus far. It also reminded me of Sunshine, a 2007 film Garland wrote for Danny Boyle, which has to be the best example of his tendency to - as the AV Club’s AA Dowd hilariously puts it - let his lizard brain take over and drastically alter the plot in the third act. But instead of Amy Adams as a linguist, Natalie Portman plays Lena, a biologist who is paired with four other women and sent into Area X to investigate the strange goings-on inside its perimeter. (Netflix)Īnnihilation forcefully reminded me of Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 classic, Arrival, a film with which it shares many thematic similarities in addition to a strong female protagonist. Annihilation is imaginatively shot by Alex Garland’s Ex Machina cinematographer, Rob Hardy. No sooner has he sat down, he falls violently ill, prompting his wife, Lena (played by Natalie Portman) to agree to enter Area X and get to the bottom of the mystery, and to find a way to stop it from expanding. And then, one day, a solitary expedition member returns home, visibly blank as to what happened during his time inside Area X. Several expeditions were conducted to investigate Area X, but no one lived to tell the tale. Three years ago, a mysterious event, speculated to be anything from an alien invasion to an act of God, caused all forms of life around a marshy stretch of land along the sea to mutate - to grow, to evolve, to change. In the film, a team of four scientists is sent into an area known only as Area X, which is where the Shimmer exists. Natalie Portman is part of a team that appears to have no reason to live. So when glorious shards of anamorphic lens flares are smeared across the screen - which happens very, very often - it’s more than just empty style, it’s visual storytelling. It is also, quite literally, about a strange force known as ‘The Shimmer’ that causes the ‘refraction of DNA’. Annihilation deals with complex, challenging themes such as the imperfection of nature and the mistakes human beings are so prone to make. You see, flares happen when light hits the lens and essentially refracts. In each of these cases - from the inadvertent hexagons that appear in Easy Rider to the shards of blue in Super 8 - the flares themselves are little more than superficial embellishments, made perhaps to evoke nostalgia, or - and this is more likely - just to appear cool.īut in Alex Garland’s Kubrickian new film, Annihilation, which was made available worldwide on Netflix (more on this later), the filmmaker’s (over)use of flares has real, textual relevance. There is, however, one key point that must be made. Lens flares have textual import in Annihilation. You see flares everywhere from the latest Taylor Swift video to the sleekest new Apple ad. More recently, lens flares have become almost omnipresent in sci-fi movies, to the point that there are even apps available for your phone using which you can create alien invasions in your living rooms. Soon, flares were popularised as a deliberate stylistic choice by Steven Spielberg, and in the years that followed, by his many admirers, most famously directors like Michael Bay and JJ Abrams.
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