Annihilation tense and terrifying

Natalie Portman in Annihilation. Image courtesy Paramount Pictures.

Annihilation comes ever so close to being a brilliant piece of science fiction. The movie is a fascinating existential thriller overloaded with tension and hopelessness to go along with its strange creatures and otherworldly locale. It has a lot to say about the mind, body, and soul, but it loses itself when it speaks as often as it does without allowing the wonder to creep in. Instead of inspiring thoughts and allowing the imagination to go wild, Annihilation tries to control the conversation, much to its detriment.

Words convey only so much for a science fiction movie; exploration in every sense of the word is of greater importance. To his credit, writer/director Alex Garland's, who adapted the eponymous novel, has the structure for the type of adventure needed for Annihilation to succeed. Garland keeps things simple with the story, trimming the novel to focus on five women assigned to explore a great unknown hiding behind a strange shimmering wall. Four of them (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, and Tuva Novotny) are assigned to investigate the source of the shimmer that is constantly consuming more and more land. The fifth, Lena (Natalie Portman), enters to find out what happened to her husband (Oscar Isaac) and to atone for her past misdeeds. It's just five women, walking through a new world where things are just close enough to normal to seem familiar, yet are still miles away from being normal. And it doesn't take long for things to start falling apart.

Annihilation reaches into the basic fears people have about themselves and their identities and brings those fears right in front of the viewers' eyes. The body horror is rendered more terrifying by the existential crisis surrounding Lena and her comrades. They become lost to something greater than they are, begin to lose the little things that make them human, which in turn makes them, and the audience by extension, even more confused and frightened. What they discover is the horror of the great unknown, the absence of certainty and the uncontrollable shifts in their being that breaks them down from the inside out. It makes for an intense movie, and Garland cranks the suspense up to around a 12 by the middle of the second act. Annihilation becomes really, really uncomfortable right around the time when the really bad things begin to happen to the protagonists, and it gets downright frightening in one really discomfiting scene in which nature attacks with shrieks and wails and teeth and nails. Twenty years ago that scene would have led to numerous nightmares on my end; now it'll be just a night or two of bad dreams.

That scene is followed by an explanation for the cause of the fear, and the definition is somewhat terrifying in its own right. But it is part of a larger struggle Garland has with Annihilation and balancing how much of an explanation he owes to the audience for the movie's oddities. In lieu of showing and implying, Garland has characters speak often in exposition for the audience's benefit, which results in emotional removal from the oddities taking place on screen. The problem extends to the narrative structure, which greatly reduces the urgency and ambiguity Annihilation strives to attain. It undercuts the film's best parts; the deterministic moments when the characters trudge forward with the same amount of uncertainty as the viewer

Garland ultimately shoots himself in the foot by keeping viewers at least a step or two outside of the world he built, although that might have been a little intentional. For a Sci-Fi movie about an uncontrolled mutation the visualization is a bit lackluster. Annihilation depicts an Earth slowly but surely morphing into something more alien but still slightly connected to the human world. Yet the film's environment doesn't feel overly alien because viewers are not indoctrinated into the bizarre terrestrial version of our planet. Annihilation is so consumed by its explanations it fails to bring viewers along with it into the great unknown. Only the characters are allowed to get lost in this world; the audience is stuck watching from a few miles away from the safety of their seats.

It's difficult not to wish for a little more out of something as outright weird and perturbing as Annihilation. With a better sense of wonder, this movie would be magnificent instead of just interestingly bizarre.

Review: Four out of Five Stars

 

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 115 minutes

Genre: Sci-Fi

Ask Away
Target audience: Sci-Fi fans and people who were really into Ex Machina.

Take the whole family?: This is way too eerie and bloody for kids.

Theater or Netflix?: Theater isn't vital, but it's definitely worth a matinee trip.

How scary is this movie?: It isn't quite traditional horror, but the overarching vibe is terrifying. The scene referenced in the review is bothersome on many levels, as are the fates of a few of the characters. People who are bothered by jump scares and more traditional frights will be fine; it's the folks who overthink movie universes who will receive a spate of bad dreams.

Watch this as well?: Annihilation shares a few similarities with Apocalypse Now, with both targeting the thin line between sanity and mayhem. There are also a few similarities with John Carpenter's The Thing, which is always great to watch.

Fifty Shades series ends with risible Freed

Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan in Fifty Shades Freed. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

After three movies steeped in banal naughtiness and moderately tawdry acts, it's hard not to feel a little let down by the Fifty Shades cinematic experience. A trilogy that could have been wicked fun and trashy was tamer than it should have been, burdened by a strange chastity unbefitting a series rooted in sex. Fifty Shades Freed doesn't end the franchise on a sour note – it's far too poorly made to be fully boring – but it does continue the series' habit of finding an uninteresting way to present its salacious content. For a franchise about love and relationships, it’s surprisingly short on passion.

Fifty Shades Freed is at least efficient in setting the viewers' expectations. It takes around five minutes for Ana (Dakota Johnson) and Christian (Jamie Dornan) to get married, go on a whirlwind honeymoon, and commence in the first of many, many sex scenes. Only a few minutes later and the film brings back the franchise's villain Hyde (Eric Johnson) and lobs in its first stupidly laughable scene. That's pretty much how the rest of the movie goes. Fifty Shades Freed has a wash, rinse, repeat style to it: Christian and Anastasia get into some asinine argument; reconcile; have sex; get stalked by Hyde; have sex; get into another argument; get stalked again by Hyde; even more sex; and so on. As the film progresses the sequences serve as justifications for showing yet another “scintillating” scene with Christian, Anastasia, a pair of handcuffs, and a random toy from their closet, at least until the last act when all the drama comes to a lackluster fruition, the filmmakers suffering from a severe case of performance anxiety.

Most of this movie is a tease. The sex scenes tease something bold and risque, yet are served as a tame fantasy that falls short of their romance-novel roots. The nudity is gratuitous but incomplete, one shot coming ever so close to a full reveal of Christian Grey before pulling right back up. The drama has aspirations for trashy goodness, but are execute poorly enough to make them inappropriate for daytime soap operas. Fifty Shades Freed sometimes comes tantalizingly close to being interesting, only to veer back to being terrible.

The problems with this movie are all over the place. From bad cinematography to bad acting to a bland soundtrack to some really poor directing by James Foley (whose career includes two Fifty Shades movies and, surprisingly, the great Glengarry Glen Ross), Fifty Shades Freed falls short in every category. The easiest fail to point out though, what brings Fifty Shades Freed to the edge of Wiseau, is a remarkably terrible script by Niall Leonard (with a hat tip to book writer E. L. James). Every basic rule of scriptwriting is ignored or failed at. Dialog often contradicts itself and the events on screen, character motivations change for the sake of changing, the plot exists as a loose concept of a story that advances itself largely by accident. That the movie eventually ends comes as something of a surprise considering how many scenes are elongated or even inserted to hit the 105 minute mark. The poor writing really hits the characters the hardest though. Hyde remains an incomplete villain, a person who is evil for the sake of being evil. The extended Grey family and the one friend in Anastasia's life provide nothing of value to the narrative. And Christian and Anastasia remain unfulfilled characters, people whose motivations for life and for their marriage are frustratingly incomplete. After three movies covering some unclear expanse of time (I remain completely confounded by the timeline in the Fifty Shades series), neither of them has really grown as a character. Despite making what appear to be some compromises, Christian still always gets what he wants, subjugating Anastasia because he can. Anastasia flashes hints of rebellion, only to willingly become owned emotionally by Christian; it's remarkable that she even has one friend who is not related to Christian. None of this makes for a healthy relationship, despite how earnest the movie is at trying to justify it as such.

Fifty Shades Freed is bad, but in a risible fashion. There was a fair amount of open laughter during some of the more ridiculous moments, the audience recognizing and appreciating the absolute brilliance of the movie's incompetence. Not much about this movie is good, but it gets a minor pass for eliciting a few chuckles and not being a completely dire experience.

Review: One and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 105 minutes

Genre: Romance

Ask Away

Target audience: The folks who've read the books and watched the other two movies.

Take the whole family?: Considering the lion's share of the movie is about sex, it's probably best to just hire a babysitter if you want to go out.

Theater or Netflix?: Or don't see it at all.

Can anyone in these movies act?: Ignoring the way too good for this Marcia Gay Harden, Dakota Johnson is the best thing this franchise has going for it. Despite the role's severe limitations, Johnson still shows flashes of charm and craftiness with Anastasia.

Watch this instead?: I watched Before Sunrise the night before this, which is an infinitely better movie about romance between actually interesting people.