Movie Enthusiast Issue 48: Post-Oscars; Annihilation
Good morning, dear readers! I take it we all survived the Oscars? Kobe Bryant now has more competitive Oscars than Alfred Hitchcock, but Roger Deakins finally has one after 14 nominations so I guess it all evens out. If you, like me, were confused by Frances McDormand’s closing words as she accepted the Oscar for Best Actress (“I have two words for you: inclusion rider”), the Washington Post has you covered:
What the heck is an inclusion rider? It’s a way to make Hollywood more equitable. Actors sign contracts when they are cast in films, and they have the ability to negotiate for riders, or additional provisions. An inclusion rider is a stipulation that the minor roles of a film reflect the demography of where the film takes place, including a proportionate number of women, minorities, LGBTQ individuals and people with disabilities. Big name actors who have leverage in negotiations could put this stipulation into their contracts, and drastically change representation in film.
Cool! I had no idea this was a thing, and apparently neither did McDormand until just recently.
Moving on! Last week for Full Stop I wrote a very strange piece that put two movies into conversation that nobody else would have think to put into conversation: João Pedro Rodrigues’s The Ornithologist and Darren Aronofsky’s mother! (Yes, after months of alluding to just how much I disliked mother!, I finally exorcised all my feelings about it!) Both of these movies do stupid things with theology and both drove me nuts on account of that. It was a challenge to figure out how to articulate my problems with them without blaming the directors for, well, not making a movie I would have made, but it was ultimately rewarding. Many thanks to my editor, Nathan Goldman, for taking me up on my pitch and then helping me make my piece comprehensible to anyone who isn't me.
Now let’s talk about Annihilation! (No spoilers!)
So I dug this movie, but unfortunately I saw it in a terrible theater setting. The quality of the projection in my theater was just gross. It looked like someone had stretched a sheet of wax paper over the lens of the projector; everything had this gauzy, low-contrast quality to it. Of course, I was probably the only person who could tell. It didn’t ruin the experience, but it did aggravate me.
As for the movie itself, the nicest thing I can say about it is that it held my attention. I wanted to know what was up with the Shimmer! I was game to go on an adventure with these five ladies as they venture into the great unknown! I, too, was curious what would happen in those much-talked-about final 30 minutes!
I didn’t love it though, and I’m not quite sure what to attribute that to. Maybe it’s just my love-hate relationship with the sci-fi genre. Whenever I go into a movie like this, I have to fight the impulse to figure out “what the movie wants to say,” because sometimes a sci-fi flick doesn’t want to say anything so much as it wants to just take you on a journey. So to that point, I’ll give the movie a pass for not having anything interesting to say about either the world of the Shimmer or our own world. (It just doesn’t. Sorry. You can fight me on this, but you’ll be wrong.)
That leaves us with the journey aspect of the movie, which is better—there were a lot of great, macabre touches, and the And Then There Were None-style plotting is always fun—but still lacking. I honestly found the whole thing to be a middling exercise in adventure filmmaking. It uses one of my least favorite framing devices, the ex post facto interrogation deployed as a crutch throughout the film whenever the screenwriter can’t think of a more inventive way to transition from one scene to the next. Inventiveness is one quality that I felt was missing from Annihilation. This probably sounds strange for me to say, if you’ve actually seen the movie, but hear me out! There’s plenty of imagination on display in the production design, the sound design, and the visual effects. The way the film is shot, the way the story is structured, the way information is communicated—the kinds of things that are primarily up to the director to decide—have much less of it. I think Richard Brody in the New Yorker gets my problem here:
Their mission begins innocuously enough—or, rather, it begins dully and unimaginatively. The movie’s writer and director, Alex Garland, shows the five women from afar, passing into the wavery Shimmer, but there’s no experiential side to the sequence: he never shows what it’s like for them to enter, never shows their point of view, never shows what they see as they’re crossing through to the other side. It’s a mark of directorial incuriosity, and it exemplifies his approach to the bulk of the film.
Throughout the whole movie Garland leaves a lot to our imagination, and not in a good way. “Okay, I’m just going to show you things happening and have characters talk about what’s happening to them, your job is to think about what that might feel like”—yeah, no thanks. Shouldn’t it be the director’s job to use some imagination, to fool around with some of the more experimental tools in the cinematic toolkit, to give us a vision of something we couldn’t have thought up on our own? Especially in a sci-fi film, where you have the license to think outside the box because your audience is more prepared for it! This is probably an unfair remark of me to make, given that the ending, again, is pretty cool. But I kept wondering why the journey we took in getting there, from a filmmaking perspective, had to be so by-the-books, given all the fantastical promise of the premise.
Now to put two things in conversation nobody else would ever think to compare (I seem to be good at doing this): The day after seeing Annihilation I went to a free screening at the Smithsonian of By the Time It Gets Dark, an experimental film by Thai director Anocha Suwichakornpong. It was good, I think, but in that totally bogus way where you can’t explain it without sounding like you’re just pulling adjectives out of a hat to describe it. Is it a metacinematic meditation on memory and being? I mean, what isn’t these days? Basically, it’s “about” a university student who’s making a movie about a woman who was an activist at the time of the 1976 Thammasat University massacre.
I’m want to talk about the final scenes of this movie (face it, none of you will ever have a chance to see it anyway), which are weird in a way that makes me suspect that Annihilation isn’t nearly as out-there innovative as it might have been. For about a minute toward the end of this movie we’re watching a sequence of Buddhist monks sitting down to meditate. There’s a drone beating away on the soundtrack as we zoom in on the backs of several monks’ shaved heads. Then! All of a sudden! We cut to a nightclub scene! The bassline sound vaguely like the incantatory drone from before!
AND THEN! The screen starts to freak out like when you’re streaming something on Netflix and your internet connection slows down and the movie you were watching in 1080p is now streaming at a monstrously lossy 144p! The image and sound quality continue to deteriorate! All the color drops out and now we’re just looking at beige rectangles doing the jitterbug!
AND THEN! The beige rectangles become pink! And then slowly some of them become green! And then slowly the image returns to focus, except now we’re not in a nightclub at all but out on some grassy knoll looking at a tree! The sky is pink! But gradually, it returns to its normal, blue hue! I am using all these exclamation points because for the duration of this sequence I was sitting there in the theater with my hands on my head, unsure of what was going on but really into it, in a way that I only briefly was into Annihilation (during, you guessed it, those much-talked-about final 30 minutes)!
Did this whole gambit work in the context of this particular movie? Was it necessary at all? I dunno, but I did leave the theater feeling with my mind feeling considerably more boggled than it did when I left Annihilation. What am I supposed to make of that?