The question isn’t “How do we get more nerds?” The question is, “Knowing that there aren’t as many nerds, how can we make sure there’s space for the serious nerd stuff to flourish?” The audience for serious nerd stuff is always smaller than the audience for consumer products, not because people are philistines, but because each of us has a limited amount of caring to pour into hobbies, and we each make different choices about which particular thing to get nerdy about. It’s the same in every field, not just movies: couture is serious nerd fashion, concept cars are serious nerd automobiles, those “deeper cuts” from NPR are serious nerd music. It’s a wonderful thing when a film manages to to strike a chord with many different types of viewers, but most of the time, there’s a difference between artistic works created for casual consumers and the ones for serious nerds. Therefore, it’s not surprising that the audience for Annihilation seems to be smaller than the audience for Arrival or Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It’s aimed at casual movie goers who maybe aren’t into sci-fi and need the movie to explain what’s going on, which is where we arrive at an important distinction: not all movies are (or need to be) made for popularity, just like not all movies are (or need to be) made for cinema nerds. It’s important to note that Arrival, while on the more creative side as far as mainstream movies go, doesn’t hold a candle to Sunshine, Ex Machina, or Annihilation in terms of how much it demands from audiences, and how few answers it’s willing to give. Reading between the lines, it’s also possible to speculate that the studio might have been hoping to repeat the success of Arrival, which is serious and introspective but still accessible to mainstream audiences, and brought in over $200 million on a $50 million budget. The films Paramount was banking on recently didn’t perform as expected, the studio changed CEOs and, reportedly, Annihilation didn’t seem super accessible at test screenings (makes sense). There are several articles analyzing why this is, financially, the right decision for Paramount, even if it’s disappointing to Garland, and it’s hard to argue with the logic. Besides advertising it as being broader than it is, the studio signed a deal to sell the international rights to Netflix rather than opening the film in theatres worldwide (it’s screening only in the USA, Canada, and China). Still, most of the press about Annihilation is not about the film itself, but rather, about Paramount’s apparent lack of confidence in it. This is followed by a final act that spills into disquieting surrealism as Lena finds the source of the shimmer, an entity that’s only defined as “unlike us”.Īnnihilation has “cult following” written all over it and, while it seems ambitious to think it could recover its reported $50 million budget, it’s also not totally outlandish (for comparison, Box Office Mojo lists Sunshine’s worldwide gross at $32 million and Garland’s last film, Ex Machina, at $37 million). Rather than being anticlimactic, it builds on Lena’s enigmatic testimony that two of her teammates are definitely dead, and the other two… no one knows. As protagonist Lena (Natalie Portman) explains, the things they see aren’t always ugly and frightening, but they’re clearly unnatural.Īlthough the film’s been criticized for opening with a scene that reveals Lena as the sole survivor of the mission, the middle act is a tense and thoughtful exploration of how each character responds to the problem of realizing that the shimmer’s disease is inside them as well. The shimmer seems to be a place where plant and animal genes are fusing and mutating in ways they shouldn’t. Although the team is attacked by more than one creature after entering the diseased area of swamp known as “the shimmer”, most of what they see is more benign and ambiguous. Its closest cousins are films like Moon, Contact, or the introspective, slow-burning curveball Sunshine (also written by Garland). It’s also not making much money.Īlthough the trailers for Annihilation try to market it as something close to Anaconda, Deep Blue Sea, or Jaws, it’s not an action-adventure movie, a creature-hunting movie, or even that much of a thriller. It’s a thoughtful, well-acted, and visually interesting story that explores different ways of understanding and engaging with the concept of disease through an unexpected lens. Borrowing a premise (and not much else) from the novel by Jeff VanderMeer, the film follows a team of five military scientists and medical professionals as they investigate unusual phenomena in a remote swamp. Alex Garland’s new sci-fi thriller, Annihilation, is a good movie.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |