Slowcloud
3 de agosto de 2018
Probably the best film of 2018
So far the only movie of 2018 I bought on Blu-ray. I loved it so much I want to reprint my blog post from Independent Ethos. It tops the list of what I think are the best films of 2018 at the halfway point of the year. I'll admit, Annihilation‘s position at number one is very personal and far from objective, as it certainly isn’t a movie — from a major studio, no less (Paramount) — for everyone. A surreal blend of science fiction and horror that will frustrate plot hole obsessives, this film speaks to the core of how I prefer to be entertained by the medium of cinema. I’m referring cinema in the true theatrical sense, as the sound design — from the film’s score to its sound effects — begs for that isolating experience in a large room in front of a big screen.Director Alex Garland based his script on the first book of Jeff VanderMeer’s “Southern Reach Trilogy.” Its plot involves an armed research time entering a new land created by a meteor that crashed into a lighthouse. A pearlescent dome called “The Shimmer” encapsulates the lighthouse and has gradually expanded over time to cover the land around it, dubbed Area X. No exploration team has ever returned from it, save for one man, a soldier named Kane (Oscar Isaac). After acting strangely in front of his biologist wife Lena (Natalie Portman), he is soon stricken ill and ends up comatose. Lena volunteers to join the next small crew to enter, a diverse mix of women including a psychologist and a botanist. What they find inside includes genetic mutations and a warped sense of time and place, where nothing seems to fall in order of the science we know on Earth.During their adventures toward the lighthouse, which include encounters with things and scenes that are horrific, surreal and beautiful — sometimes all at once — the women, including a terrific Jennifer Jason Leigh as the psychologist Dr. Ventress, their numbers dwindle. A mix of ambivalence, enlightenment and menace, Ventress is key to the film’s ingenious reveal of what lies at the heart of the alien power. It’s not just because she has the best line alluding to the film’s title during the film’s most startling moment of pyrotechnics. Ventress is the sort of embodiment of life and death refracted in the world below the shimmer. DNA and psychology play a role that speaks to inherited neurosis and obsession, but also the sensitivity of DNA mixing between beings, where a kiss — or a bite — could change your construction and destiny forever. Annihilation is out there in a beautiful and fearsome way that makes the viewer aware of something else besides escapism or the present moment, a thoughtful science fiction film that is illogical in a frightful way because it’s based on something mystical in our biology.—Hans MorgensternVer másVer menos
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