Contemporary cinema is dominated by fast cutting and bombastic visual spectacle. Attuned to the fast times of the present, mainstream filmmaking runs at the pace of its audiences. It is a curious phenomenon considering the average blockbuster is actually quite long. Your typical Marvel film will run to about 2 hours and 15 mins. The recent, magnificent Black Panther features a sharp screenplay and visually rich vistas, yet it is engaging as a work of visceral energy. It rushes headlong through its vision and achieves the feat of making two hours feel like fifteen minutes. Alex Garland’s Annihilation arrives with a different approach, preferring to transcend its genre with a tone that is meditative and focused on creating an environment. [Read more…]
Annihilation Is Surely Ambitious Yet Sadly Underwhelming
Annihilation, directed by Alex Garland
Reviewed by Kristy Puchko
Alex Garland carved out a reputation as a stellar screenwriter with cerebral sci-fi fare like the zombie thriller 28 Days Later, the space-set adventure Sunshine, and the clone-centered romance Never Let Me Go. Then he shocked and awed critics and audiences alike with his directorial debut, Ex Machina. The high-tech fairy tale showed a crisp visual style that played beautifully with Garland’s heady, philosophizing script, and was roundly proclaimed one of the best films of 2014. So it was with great anticipation that critics awaited his follow-up, Annihilation. And while many have breathlessly sung the praises of Garland’s loose adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s novel, this critic was left cold. [Read more…]