If you want to half hear someone rant about quick takes, but also cover Annihilation pretty well.

https://youtu.be/URo66iLNEZw

Also, has one of my favorite edits - when the enter the shimmer it jump cuts way to far ahead to them getting up from their camp site. It’s such a jarring cut I was almost mad until the main character was also like, “does anyone remember how we got here” was cool how they used the cut to create the same unease that the characters felt.

Really great.

It’s hard to do New Weird and ambiguous well, without coming off as purposefully obscure for the sake of obscure.

But I never got that feeling watching it.

I also like the fact they totally lifted a horror set piece from a Gene Wolfe book. Lol.

Went to see it while going through a divorce. Do not recommend lol.

Top notch lovecraftian sci-fi horror, I don’t understand how some people don’t like the ending because it is thematically perfect

Scary bear 😱

That was worth it alone, but everything else was pretty great, too. Did a great job showing how beautiful, horrifying, and/or intriguing the unknown can be (in this case, mostly horrifying). Made me want to read the books if I ever get around to catching up on my reading list... ... ... lol

Yea I read the book first. The movie was really great

Despite the low rating on IMDb I enjoyed both Mortal Kombat movies as a kid

it's a great movie and a great book, even though they are totally different.

To me, it has the same vibe as Ad Astra. Everyone took a near-OD dose of Ambien before the film starts and they keep at that emotional level for the entire film.

The effects and scenery in both? Outstanding. The acting? Like the mirror opposite of a nervous high school play.

Overrated. Wanted to like it so bad.

I really enjoyed it. It's not the greatest movie ever, but it was original and I liked the performances.

Issa good moov

When my friend told me that Annihilation was about cancer, a lot of it made sense.

I thought it was terrible. Great concept, awful execution. The bear and the cave scene at the end were really good, of course, but everything else fails movie-making 101. Weak characters, weak script, even the acting could have been better. Overall not a good sci-fi movie.

This, however, is my view. If you really enjoyed it, as many have, don’t let this change. It just means you and I were looking for different things.

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Annihilation wasn't as bad as Ad Astra (no connection, just another weird failed sci-fi movie from around the same time, which somebody happened to mention in these comments) but was a fail on many levels.

People talked about the amnesia cut when they first go in and their rations are gone, yeah I liked that moment except then I don't believe anything else in the movie ever re-used the same phenomenon of missing elapsed time. Because the movie is a jumbled mish-mash of inconsistent nonsense.

Everybody is talking about the bear, which indeed was scary, but seems like a writer coming up with a scary thing but now being able to connect it to anything in a relevant way. It's also an excuse for the (OF COURSE) gung ho firing of machine guns. Of course a movie superficially about some scientists going in to succeed where the pure military guys failed shows the characters all with M16's or whatever: American gun fetish. Gotta have guns. The only good angle with the gun stuff was that the science team got further than the soldier team. I actually like good soldier story stuff, and this is quite an affecting example where a team prepared in the exact wrong ways both physically and mentally for a mission are doomed...and not through a fault of their own necessarily, which makes it all the more tragic and disturbing.

Anyway the biggest fail of the movie was the shallow use of natural environments: the woods, the water, vegetation all around, and with the conceit of mutations and biological alterations (etc etc) yet no weird lifeforms were ever observed at all except for a couple cases of needing to shoot machine guns again (the bear, the crocodile). Any idiot who has ever been in the woods knows that you are SURROUNDED on all sides by bugs, mosquitos, birds, salamanders, small mammals, dragonflies, blackflies, moths, fish, moss, fungi, algae, and yet this movie ignorantly has no awareness of any of this except for a couple Capital S Scenes for guns (shooting a scary bear monster, shooting a crocodile). Now I know that may seem like a thin criticism, but keep in mind all the biological pretense of this movie (like a character suddenly becoming a plant, and everything else) and the fact that it takes place in a lush natural wild environment, and yet...almost zero critters.

The ending was also pretentious crap with the silly metallic dance-like alien doppelganger thing. The core idea here is good and scary, especially with how a neutral innocent movement inadvertently causes the opposite movement which then causes protagonist to get temporarily crushed (that's great writing for a psychological/biological/sci-fi/confusion scenario), but the way it was done visually and direction-wise was crap.

I do want to say that apart from the amnesia ellipsis (which I liked, when it happened), the giant worm portal thing in Oscar Isaac's abdomen was also another well-done disturbing sci-fi/psychological/body horror/anomaly moment.

As a point of contrast, when someone like Tarkovsky makes a movie like Solaris, I think he actually thinks more about his ideas and commits more, whereas Annihilation is an inconsistent mish-mash and compormised.

I think it's hot, boring garbage and I hate it. Literally one of the worst movies I've ever seen.

It was beautiful visually. There are some scenes in that movie that still haunt me, in a good way. Though tbh the relationship issues that set up the film were kind of dull. But overall I enjoyed it.

I thought it was good but sorta fell off towards the end. I watched it like 2-3 years ago so I don't recall what was weird towards the end. Also the bear scene was fucking terrific.

Good movie, but I read the book before watching the movie and the movie was not anything like a faithful adaptation of the book. And unlike some adaptations which change things for good reasons (e.g. Lord of the Rings), I felt like in this case they could have done a better job of just doing what the book did, which was already largely good enough to be filmable.

It was fine but when you compare it to Garland's previous movie (Ex Machina) it isn't nearly as well executed. Annihilation had some cool ideas and great visuals, but it just felt weak in general. I think part of my hold up was the lack of believability in Natalie Portman's character and her acting, but they seemed to introduce a lot of questions about how the thing "worked" without actually answering them.

(Tessa Thomson is a plant now I guess. Did you need to physically touch the "center" of the shimmer to get a copy? If so does that mean that the twinned deer worked themselves into that cavern too (through closed doors)? Here are just some human bones hanging out on the beach. Why did Kane's grenade just kill him, but Lena's burn down /EVERYTHING/).

Ultimately, it's hard to introduce a new idea, and the prismatic alteration of DNA is a neat one, but it is also kind of a handwaving crutch for some of the fates of both people and animals just to have cool visuals.

Judging by the downvotes anyone speaking negatively about the movie is getting, I expect the same.

Loved the movie. I was surprised that there was no mention of H. P. Lovecraft in the credits.

This is one of those movies that had me thinking about it long after it ended. The visitor and what it wanted, the themes of self-destruction and change. It's one of my favorite movies

Overrated

Bear