Review of Annihilation (2018) by Joe M — 14 Mar 2018

Wow. Netflix has officially become the Buzzfeed of the film world.

The lazy attempt to jump on the "Empowering women in the film industry" bandwagon is about as flimsy as the plot.

So...the plot.

The movie opens on Natalie Portman patronising (they'd call this "mansplaining" if she had a penis) a class of university medical students, by explaining what a cell is.

It then cuts almost immediately to Nat at home crying over her lost husband, as a soppy emotional song plays. We've never met this guy, therefore we don't care who is or what happened to him, and all we know of Nat at this point is that she's patronising and anti-social. Yet for some reason, [insert director / writer names here] seem to think we give a damn. No. We don't. Also, ever hear of the power of silence? It would have been much stronger, emphasising the emptiness of her life. I don't know anything about making movies, but I know that two minutes into a movie that has told us nothing about the characters, I don't give a damn about the characters. This is all a part of the "sensitive feelings" bandwagon that needy film makers have been blindly jumping onto lately.

Ok. Zombie husband comes home and they both get taken to the base on the border of soap bubble land, at EXACTLY the same point in time that the govt is about to send an ethnically-diverse, all women-squad with zero training (two of the three can't even work out north from south) into the bubble land wilderness to survive alone, Bear Grylls style.

They head off into soap bubble land laden with equipment but without the ONLY thing the govt knows (because of zombie husband who Nat herself said looks like a victim of radiation or chemicals) will be effective - biohazard suits and oxygen masks.

It also just so happens that Nat has EXACTLY the right qualifications to slot into the Ghostbusterettes team as clueless and utterly untrained team member 5. So, double coincidence / s**tty lazy storyline.

Also we have a quick sex scene in which Nat of course is on top.

We also see a flashback to a room in which she's getting bluntly interrogated by a man (because men are evil and without feelings).

They shoot a crocodile, thankfully without crossing the beams and...annihilating everything.

Then they find a video recorder with a film (that has been spliced and edited within the recorder) which extremely clearly shows a man with a slimy creature sliding around in his stomach for over ten seconds, yet one of the ghostbusterettes (plainly not the Bill Murray one who has some sense of reality) laughably, dismisses it as a trick of the light.

Nat has a flashback to good times with her husband, to a song that that blatantly rips off The Last of Us soundtrack.

Some other stuff happens. It all looks a lot like The Last of Us. I think they go crazy or something and start seeing trippy 90s-style graphics. Someone runs through a cave like a moron and we see lots of Nat looking concerned. There's a room with a guy who forgot to take off his green-screen suit. I zoned out at some point in the second half so not really sure what happens really. There are some cells and fires and it all gets vague and surreal like so many of these films now.

So.

I'm all for equality. But not when it's being appropriated without sense or logic and being used for no other reason than [insert director / writer names here] want to jump onto the latest social movement bandwagon like zombie lemmings because they're spineless and desperate for praise.

Also, there's a trend for movies to be vague and open-ended, especially art-house films. The makers seem to think this is arty. No. It's f**ing lazy and shows you don't give a damn about your audience.

This movie will probably do really well because social media is conning people into thinking garbage is good for them. But thankfully, history will be much less kind to nonsense like this.