On The Screen – Annihilation – 7/26/2018

This is kind of a rubber band post – it bounces me back to books I read and posts I published around the end of February.  Over the course of about two weeks, I read all three of the “Southern Reach” books in anticipation of seeing the movie.  By the end of that marathon, I was relatively ambivalent about seeing the film – something reflected in my posts – a partial review about halfway through the series:

http://booksofbrian.com/on-the-nightstand-the-southern-reach-trilogy-2-18-2018/

And an Epilogue – after finishing the series:

http://booksofbrian.com/on-the-nightstand-the-southern-reach-trilogy-epilogue-2-24-2018/

I was impressed with the books – found them to be well worth the time even if they were challenging and exhausting reads.  I was skeptical about the decision to turn the first book in the series – “Annihilation” – into a movie.  I just didn’t see how it could be done and assumed that any attempt to do so would never capture the aspects of the books that – in my mind – gave them merit.

Well – fast forward to the evening of July 25 – my wife and step daughter are traveling – the dogs and I are home alone – I could be reading but – for some reason – I turn on the TV and check the New Movies list on Xfinity.  There it is – almost begging me to watch – so I do.

I’m not going to leave anyone in suspense on this and I will go back to what I wrote in the my Epilogue post:

“In my first post on the Trilogy, I mentioned that I wanted to finish the books before the release of “Annihilation” as well as my concern about how anyone could turn this body of work into a movie.  I’m doubling down on that after finishing all three books.  THERE…IS…NO…WAY!!  I like Natalie Portman and I’m sure they’ve made an entertaining movie but I’m also pretty sure that it bears only a passing resemblance to the book and to what Jeff VanderMeer has managed to accomplish with it.”

I was right – there was no way – and I wish I’d never wasted the time – two hours that I’ll never get back – far worse than reading a bad book.  I hope VanderMeer was well paid for the rights to the story because I believe the movie – in large part – robs the books of the legitimacy they deserve.  I have two primary complaints.

First and foremost – there was very little about the movie that captured the spirit or the story or the characters that Jeff VanderMeer made so compelling in his books.  The only things the book and the movie have in common:  the main character, the existence of a facility called The Southern Reach, the existence of an area called The Shimmer, the Lighthouse, a narrative based on a final excursion into The Shimmer and the concept of an alien presence that’s radically altering the biology of our world.  Other than that, the movie bears little resemblance to the book – it radically reinterprets the personality of the Biologist, it posits a relationship with her husband that never existed in the books, it completely reimagines the details of the final excursion, it offers up an alien presence that bears no real resemblance to the one you encounter in the book, and the climax and ending are wrecked.  I do believe what I’d originally written – there was no way to turn this book into a movie that did the story justice.  To make it marketable or understandable, it was necessary to tell a completely different story.

That – in and of itself – would not be enough to leave me so dissatisfied.  It’s often the case that a truly original work like “Annihilation” has to be re-interpreted in order to make it accessible to TV and movie audiences but that doesn’t necessarily mean the reinterpretation loses its entertainment value.  “Altered Carbon” is a good example – that was an extremely complex story that required significant changes to make it viable for television.  In so doing, the producers departed in significant ways from the story contained in the book.  They were nevertheless able to make an extremely entertaining, visually striking TV serial that I truly enjoyed.

Not the case here.  On top of all the deviations, I feel like they made a decidedly mediocre movie.  The acting was uninspired and the cinematography was mundane.  In the face of the radical liberties they took with characters and a story that I found fascinating, I might still have enjoyed the movie if they’d made a good movie.  By the final thirty minutes, I was struggling to stay awake.  I was wrong when I expressed any confidence in the likelihood that they’d give us something entertaining.

My last word – the final scene in the movie very subtly hints at the possibility of more to come.  Jeff – please don’t let that happen.