Annihilation is one of the words I find impossible to spell (I wonder which commonly known words are the hardest?), and also the name of the film the GF and I watched last night.
I had read the book by Jeff VanderMeer and enjoyed its hallucinogenic lunacy. The image of the upside-down tower stayed with me, still does. When I heard it was being turned into a film, it seemed impossible; there was barely any plot, it was more atmosphere than anything else. Despite, or because of Alex Garland’s changes, though, it made for a good film. It had definite touches of one of his other works, Sunshine, which perhaps suffered from poor direction as the ideas were good, but became almost farcical at the end. Annhilation definitely had a touch of Sunshine about it, though it pitched it far better. It took the premise and feel of VanderMeer’s book and applied a plot to it. In doing so it made it filmable. The shimmer which engulfs an unnamed location in America (I thought it must be the Everglades, though I think the books eventually put it in California) is very CGI, but low key enough that it looked strange and artificial rather than clunky. It had callouts to lots of films I like, from 2001 to The Thing, and was very indebted to Stalker, which I can’t claim to like, but did appreciate.
The writing was clunky at times, and there were a few bits I wished it had done without – the explicitly alien nature of the Shimmer, a standard Hollywood ™ academic lecture with much philosophising and little information, but with students studiously writing down every word.
I was a bit thrown by Natalie Portman whom I saw soon after she finished the first Star Wars prequel, in which she looked very young. Actually I didn’t see her, and consequently nearly hit her with a tray. She and I are about the same age, so the difference in her face is presumably also in mine, though of course I can’t really see or conceive it. She is certainly very beautiful, and has become more so beautiful with age.
It is very hot by London standards. Thirty degrees!