I read Annihilation either last year or the year before. I enjoyed it, but found it mostly unmemorable except for a few scenes from it that had particularly cool ideas. Standouts were the glowing words in the inverted tower, the hypnosis of the team and its effects on them and their paranoia and the lighthouse full of notebooks.
I get the worrying feeling that the director also read the book some time ago, and then tried to make this film1 based on those half-remembered ideas. It doesn't really hang together with a coherent plot, being mostly a series of almost standalone set pieces designed to show off some cool visual, without really having them as a logical whole.
I remember the book as an exploration of ideas with an interestingly twisty plot, but the film has ended up more or less as a straight horror. Our team of five (now with names to avoid the problem of trying to refer to everybody by their job titles as per the book) explore the patch of world hidden inside "the Shimmer", a soap bubble-looking wall that sprung up around a lighthouse three years ago.
The Shimmer has been slowly expanding, and has failed to release all but one of the explorers that have previously entered it. The film doesn't give us much of the background to why this team have been chosen, and they feel generally bashed into place, without much room to establish themselves (other than as "badasses").
Unfortunately, the world inside the Shimmer is a bit of a hellhole, with monstrous animals, plants that look like us and enough body horror to have the Girl screaming and hiding under a blanket. The team have to survive these long enough to attempt to stop the insidious growth of the Shimmer. They didn't really help themselves with their insistence on splitting up and jumping into holes.
The book asked a lot of questions and didn't really answer them. (Neither did the second. Never read the third.) This film answers about half of the questions, but the answers are by no means convincing, and don't make a lot of sense. A bit of reading around suggests that there are intended themes around psychological problems and self-destruction, some of which I saw, some of which I didn't. Films shouldn't really need secondary reading, however.
The climax was particularly weak, given that it solved most of the cast's problems with interpretative dance, in a sequence that was a bit too inspired by Lawnmower Man.
The one redeeming feature is that the visual effects and the filmography are rather neat. The body horror is gruesome, especially the very first example, which is an absolutely horrifying moment. Did feel like someone discovered a fractal making program during filming and just could not stop playing with it though.
Honestly, just don't bother. If you enjoyed the book, the film is definitely a disappointment, and if you've not read it, there is no need for you to watch this.
Tagged: Film Horror Adaptation Fiction Netflix