Annihilation (2018)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2798920/
Most of the positive reviews I've read online about this movie have one thing in common: it's visually stunning
i.e. as in pretty but pretty does not make a movie good.
It's the story that makes a movie good and the story in this movie
is asinine right from the beginning part where the government send Natalie Portman and 4 women (a psychiatrist, a physicist, a geomorphologist and a paramedic) to go into an anomaly not from this world and investigate it.
Now keep in mind that several fully trained military teams have entered that same alien anomalybefore and only onesoldier have returned barely alive at first and now in a coma nearing death.
So here we have 5 women, one of them with prior military training having served in the U.S. Army for 7 years and the rest, well no military training at all - and they are all given firearms but not given any military escort or any transports.
The anomaly covers a land mass area of several 100 square miles and these 5 women [and all the teams before them] entered it on foot. Where the APC? The military Hummers? Or even a couple of choppers to fly them in and around?
Plus one of them is a paramedic and how is a paramedic qualified to investigate and research something that's not of this earth?
The rest of the movie and the actions of the 5 characters just makes no sense.
Furthermore the movie ends with nothing explained: what was the anomaly? why were the aliens here? why did they mimic everything they touch? what did the aliens want?
Then there are the plot holes, so many of them you'd wonder whoever wrote the script didn't bother to have anyone read it and check it for continuity and mistakes and logic before the actual filming began.
Some of the reviews online said: amazing, thought provoking, unique.
What the heck? Were these reviewers
paid by the studio to said those things?
Yes, it was amazing. An amazing waste of Natalie Portman and Jennifer Jason Leigh.
Yes, it was thought provoking. It provoked me to think of the many different ways the 5 characters on screen could hurry up and die so the movie would hurry up and end.
Yes, it was unique. A unique piece of stupidity that should never had been made.
I can't believe this is from the same director who gave us the great film
Ex Machina in 2015.
It's easy to see why this was released to Netflix: the audiences at test screenings didn't like it. The studio wanted the final cut changed with reshoots and rewrites and a new ending. The producer and director refused.
The studio, Paramount, decided to not take the financial risk to give it a wide domestic theatrical release and gave it to Netflix after it was in a limited number of theaters for only 2 weeks.
This movie also reminds me of another recent aliens coming to Earth movie that had gotten good reviews but was actually another piece of you know what.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/
Even the cute and hot Natalie Portman, who I've always love to ogle at regardless what role she's playing, can't save this movie.
0/5