Annihilation

Year:	2018
Country:	International
Language:	English
Genre:	Adventure, Drama, Fantasy
IMDB:	IMDB Page
Rating:	8.0 Rate
Collection:	Seen It Wishlist
Community:	6 Have Seen


Director	Alex Garland
Selected Cast	Natalie Portman as The Biologist
	Tessa Thompson as The Surveyor
	Oscar Isaac as The Biologist's Husband
	Jennifer Jason Leigh as The Psychologist

On DVD & Blu-ray World

DVD

Annihilation - Paramount - USA (2018)

Blu-ray

Annihilation - Paramount - Australia (2019)

Multi-Format

Annihilation - Paramount - USA (2019)

Images

Comments and Reviews


Magic Marmalade 25th Jan 2022		Rated 8/10 Another journey into a heart of darkness and light. Alex Garland does it again! ...Cook your noodle, that is. For my money, he deserves his place among the modern masters of intelligent cinema, alongside Villeneuve and Nolan. This time he takes a lot of fairly stock ideas that are usually employed by lazy writers to cobble together straight to streaming cheapo, knock-off Sci-Fi, and instead, uses them as a cinematic language to carry through some more profound thoughts and story. In this case, he begins with the tried and trusted alien object / meteor crashing to earth and messing with the fabric of our reality (Color Out Of Space - Lovecraft) via an inscrutable alien phenomena: The "Shimmer", which is a huge curtain of expanding protoplasmic radiation stuff, that's gradually swallowing the world, and from which, any attempt to investigate it yields no clues as to it's nature, as those sent never return... ...Until, that is, one of the soldiers sent (Oscar Isaac)- thought lost - arrives mysteriously back at his home to his grieving wife (Doctor and former soldier - Natalie Portman), but he is odd, and quickly falls ill, and is taken into military quarantine... his only hope, that Portman and a small group of soldiers can go in tot he Shimmer, and unlock it's mysteries. This sets up a kind of Heart of Darkness / Apocalypse Now, journey into the phenomenon ,and "Down river", where things start going very strange indeed, and increasingly horrific. And there are some truly horrifying concepts in this movie, as well as some quite beautiful ones - sometimes at the same time! And while there's a very definite H. R. Geiger / Alien debt owed at the end, which anyone will pick up on, all this only serves to carry through a deeper story, which is to do with psychological self destruction, identity, definition of reality, and what that might be, and even this, strongly conveys a profound Buddhist like, spiritual idea of self Annihilation (Oceanic consciousness etc.). So it's essentially a hard spiritual pilgrimage into very disturbing territory, that is very unsettling at times, obscure, difficult to wrap your head around what's happening, but quite rewarding if you do stay with it. This would sit comfortably on notional DVD shelf next to movies like Arrival, Interstellar (anything by those two directors- Villeneuve and Nolan), in being a slow burning, thoughtful mind-bender, punctuated by small moments of action. And, as I say, Garland uses those "tropes" deliberately, as a "mash-up" language not incompatible with the central theme of the phenomenon itself. Excellent, and should be better known. 4 people found this review helpful. ✔︎ Helpful Review?



jaimeeduardo 29th Sep 2020

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