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chiasaur11 posted:With that as the baseline, they should maintain standard safety procedures as much as possible. No information means go with what works in other circumstances and all. Everyone in the expedition (except for Lena) is so damaged that they don't really want to come back and therefore doesn't care that much about safety procedures.
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Mar 24, 2018 12:20
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precision posted:I've also seen people float the theory that this film doesn't take place on Earth at all. This is what happens when a movie does an incredibly bad job of conveying basic information. With respect to HUNDU, the problem is not that Garland is an interesting director hampered by over-reliance on exposition; the problem is that Garland is an ‘ideas man’ who can skim through hundreds of books to put together a lore but fundamentally cannot direct. He can quote Beckett, but has no clue how to visualize something as basic as a mirage. Annihilation is shot like a lesser Marvel Studios film. Its achronological narrative structure is haphazard. It traffics in obscurantism and, like Ex Machina, it’s somehow worse than every other film in its genre. Now we’re on page 14, and still nobody knows what happens in Annihilation - except ‘self-destruction’ and ‘cancer’, because the characters say those words like 25 times apiece. The director said ‘self-destruction’ is the keyword in interviews. Did you know Batman Begins is about fear? Let’s start over. Annihilation is, fundamentally, a New Age appropriation of Wagner’s Parsifal, dropping numerous esoteric references to quantum mysticism and the ‘ancient wisdom’ of Joseph Campbell. The thing at the end is specifically a reference to the ‘Sacred Geometry’ nonsense promoted on sites like CrystalLinks.com and Ancient-Wisdom.com. You’ve been had.
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Mar 24, 2018 14:42
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Mar 24, 2018 15:03
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Area-X is like Stalker’s Zone in that it is a place outside of society’s web where someone can be self reflective. Truths can be revealed and wishes can be granted, even if you have no ability to foretell what that wish will be. It just so happens that Area-X, a place where great and unpredictable change both physical and mental are possible, requires a blazing hot death drive to fully explore. And why would it not? Our Biologist returns to society fully alien to it, herself, and to her husband- but fully recommited to making that one relationship work. Instead of hesitating for fear of what might happen, she breaches the center of the zone and recieves her wish. Everything about her has died in exchange for fixing what she saw as her greatest failure.
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Mar 24, 2018 15:13
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The thing at the end is a fractal-patterned torus. Why a torus? "In our model of cosmometry, the torus is the fundamental form of balanced energy flow found in sustainable systems at all scales. It is the primary component that enables a seamless fractal embedding of energy flow from micro-atomic to macro-galactic wherein each individual entity has its unique identity while also being connected with all else. In the words of pioneering researcher Arthur Young: 'The self in a toroidal Universe can be both separate and connected with everything else.'" -UnarianWisdom.com  You see, a tree and a human are fundamentally the same, because of the toroidal energy flows. Wow! Capntastic posted:Our Biologist returns to society fully alien to it, herself, and to her husband- but fully recommited to making that one relationship work. Instead of hesitating for fear of what might happen, she breaches the center of the zone and recieves her wish. "It would thus be interesting to put Tarkovsky in the series of Hollywood commercial rewritings of novels which have served as the base for a movie: Tarkovsky does exactly the same as the lowest Hollywood producer, reinscribing the enigmatic encounter with Otherness into the framework of the production of the couple..." -Zizek You're not wrong, but saying "it's like Stalker" doesn't answer anything; it just raises the question of what's happening in Stalker. The Shimmer is clearly not just 'a place', like Hanging Rock or the woods outside Burkittsville, Maryland. The flimmakers dumped money into CG to create a luminiferous aether effect. This is the problem with the film's references: they are used to obscure rather than clarify. Nobody seemed to have noticed that Ventress' "alien" ramblings are just a series of decontextualized Beckett quotes, so it's possible to reverse-engineer the 'full' version of the alien monologue: "I grow gnomic. It is the last phase. ... It’s to me this evening something has to happen, to my body as in myth and metamorphosis, this old body to which nothing ever happened, or so little, which never met with anything, wished for anything, in its tarnished universe, except for the mirrors to shatter, the plane, the curved, the magnifying, the minifying, and to vanish in the havoc of its images. ... I did as when I could not sleep. I wandered in my mind, slowly, noting every detail of the labyrinth, its paths as familiar as those of my garden and yet ever new, as empty as the heart could wish or alive with strange encounters. And I heard the distant cymbals, There is still time, still time. But there was not, for I ceased, all vanished and I tried once more to turn my thoughts to the Molloy affair. Unfathomable mind, now beacon, now sea." ...so now you're tasked with interpreting Beckett, just like the stuff about immortal cells is a very basic reference to Freud, just tossed out there. It's designed to make things obscure, so that you perceive a magical 'depth' to the stupid relationship drama. The cancerous corruption is the affair, and Portman has to learn to stop having sex with the black dude in order to restore the cosmic marriage-balance of masculine and feminine principles. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Mar 24, 2018 |
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Mar 24, 2018 16:05
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viral spiral posted:I only look at porn when I'm not getting laid, thanks. Anybody else seeing this fuckin post? Holy moley.
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Mar 24, 2018 16:40
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:This is what happens when a movie does an incredibly bad job of conveying basic information. This post fuckin sucks
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Mar 24, 2018 16:56
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After seeing it on Netflix, I can only assume it was a downvoted SCP exploration log that broke containment before it could be deleted. A lot of the SCP exploration logs and items would make much better movies. Southern Reach has the same weird/nihilistic/meh care for their agents as the Foundation does for D-class testers, it made me think someone had read the SCP files and decided to take a story and make a movie out of it. Only they took one of the crappier stories with a neat idea that needed a better writer/directory/cast. Comstar fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Mar 24, 2018 |
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Mar 24, 2018 17:47
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:This is what happens when a movie does an incredibly bad job of conveying basic information. While you're not wrong, what I thought was interesting was, as opposed to the new age stuff you referenced, Annihilation presents the same conclusions as being horrific, not comforting. There isn't any kind of peace to be found in accepting the oneness of everything and your eternal piece in the infinite. Area X is presented as an excess of life, with the very thing we try to comfort ourselves from, death and the void, being taken away and shown to be the only chance of comfort we had in the face of too much life. Even your consciousness will never be turned off, it will just mutate into a new material, like the skull of a bear.
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Mar 24, 2018 18:37
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Lil Mama Im Sorry posted:like the skull of a bear. or the skull of a manbearpig
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Mar 24, 2018 20:23
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Comstar posted:After seeing it on Netflix, I can only assume it was a downvoted SCP exploration log that broke containment before it could be deleted. A lot of the SCP exploration logs and items would make much better movies. Ooooooof
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Mar 24, 2018 21:32
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Lil Mama Im Sorry posted:While you're not wrong, what I thought was interesting was, as opposed to the new age stuff you referenced, Annihilation presents the same conclusions as being horrific, not comforting. There isn't any kind of peace to be found in accepting the oneness of everything and your eternal piece in the infinite. Area X is presented as an excess of life, with the very thing we try to comfort ourselves from, death and the void, being taken away and shown to be the only chance of comfort we had in the face of too much life. Even your consciousness will never be turned off, it will just mutate into a new material, like the skull of a bear. That's the trouble inside the shimmer - which is presented as a metaphorical (but quasi-literal) warzone, with traumatic tortures, warcrimes and whatnot. (Kane's suicide video is, pointedly, presented as both an ISIS execution and Abu Ghraib sort of thing simultaneously). But, outside the shimmer, we have the harmony-Goddess of Avatar. To clarify, let’s go back a step and talk about the basic sci-fi premise of the film, which is another of those things that people have studiously avoided. Expository dialogue tells us that shimmer is a prism that ‘refracts everything’, up to and including complex molecules. So instantly we’re talking questionable interpretations of quantum physics - i.e. of particle-wave duality. In order to refract a molecule, the molecule must be a wave. And this molecule would also have to pass through a truly strange transparent medium, hence the film presenting a distortion (of space time?) that reveals the presence of a luminiferous aether. The film uses the metaphor of a glass of water but, really, we’re talking about refraction in a non-uniform medium, which is what you see with a mirage - changes in the density of the air, which can become quite complex. In other words, the concept of the film is that they’re in a world where mirages are real; it’s not just an optical illusion; reality itself is being distorted. Fata Morgana, the fairy sorceress, really is producing ‘fairy castles’. The problem is that, accepting this logic, everything should be ripped apart. Anyone who’s seen a mirage could tell you this. Large chunks of the ground should be transported into the sky, and so-on. People’s bodies wouldn’t just get mixed with specific plant genes but with the air, minerals - everything. It’s the kind stuff that would certainly result in instant fatal embolisms, massive haemorrhaging, etc.  The fact that everyone doesn’t just die is where the film gets into the loopy New Age Deepak Chopra territory, because the ‘glass of water’ metaphor only works if you have a third observer - the camera. Portman and Isaac would not see anything unusual from their perspectives, but the camera’s imagined gaze - looking through the glass - interprets their hands as blobs intermixing. So this disembodied gaze is an agent actively putting things back together again, fixing the dying bear and so-on. This evokes the quantum-mystical (mis-)interpretation of the observer effect where God is the ultimate observer, who collapses the waveform and creates a harmonious reality. But inside the shimmer, of course, we have disharmony and corruption. It’s the province of an evil God. So we go back to the figure of the sorceress Morgana or, more specifically, the sorcerer Klingsor in Parsifal (who, for example, attempts to seduce the hero with flower maidens). The film’s logic is pretty much literally that a wizard did it. When this logic is applied to The Blair Witch Project, the witch is totally real and annoys the teens with interdimensional quantum trickery. Applied to Bigfoot, Bigfoot uses the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to make himself invisible or something. Grey aliens are the cause of 'missing time' and 'cattle mutilations'. We can go on like this. Annhilation presents us with ancient aliens bullshit - along the same lines as the bad movie Blood Glacier, where we have the explanation that such mythical creatures as minotaurs and griffins really did exist, but were produced by an ancient gene-splicing virus capable of mixing an eagle with a lion or whatever. It's important to understand that this is an ideological trap. "The Real, at its most radical, has to be totally de-substantialized. It is not an external thing that resists being caught in the symbolic network, but the crack within the symbolic network itself. The Real as the monstrous Thing behind the veil of appearances is precisely the ultimate lure which, as Richard Kearney was right to emphasize, lends itself easily to the New Age appropriation, as in the Joseph Campbell’s notion of the monstrous God." -Zizek The 'alien' at the end is not the torus; it's the empty chamber. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 21:58 on Mar 24, 2018 |
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Mar 24, 2018 21:50
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That month just flew by 
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Mar 24, 2018 22:05
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Comstar posted:After seeing it on Netflix, I can only assume it was a downvoted SCP exploration log that broke containment before it could be deleted. A lot of the SCP exploration logs and items would make much better movies. lmao
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Mar 24, 2018 23:32
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SMG is the Shimmer in the form of a forums poster
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Mar 25, 2018 02:05
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Gnome de plume posted:SMG is the Shimmer in the form of a forums poster Accurate.
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Mar 25, 2018 02:22
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Gnome de plume posted:SMG is the Shimmer in the form of a forums poster holy poo poo
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Mar 25, 2018 02:33
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Any film with any degree of narrative complexity is going to produce this kind of disagreement and uncertainty and I don't take that as proof of the filmmakers doing a bad job. People sometimes miss this poo poo. Harlan Ellison did not see the satire in Robocop. A lot of why I like this film is because so many of these low budget Cerebral and Intellectual sci fi films have felt very sterile and overly composed, and this feels messy- like it's as much Fulci as Tarkovsky. It feels organic, alive. It's not a film that discriminates between respectable and trashy material and that is a good instinct.
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Mar 25, 2018 04:44
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Gnome de plume posted:SMG is the Shimmer in the form of a forums poster He refracts bad posting and turns it into good posting
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Mar 25, 2018 06:50
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smg will you see ready player one
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Mar 25, 2018 07:11
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I Before E posted:He refracts bad posting and turns it into good posting This post was refracted.
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Mar 25, 2018 07:59
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Maxwell Lord posted:Any film with any degree of narrative complexity is going to produce this kind of disagreement and uncertainty and I don't take that as proof of the filmmakers doing a bad job. What disagreement? I am addressing the uniformity of the responses. Your appeal to complexity is entirely in line with the 14-page consensus that the film is incomprehensible and therefore deep. But the problem is that depth is an illusion; it’s very easy to identify how the film fucks up. For example: blood cells don’t divide. This means very specific things. When Portman looks at her blood cells and reacts with shock, is she shocked because her body no longer technically has functional blood and she is therefore a cartoon person? Or is the inaccurate imagery meant as a shorthand for blood cancer (aka leukaemia (which actually affects the bone marrow))? Or is Portman shocked by the weird fact that only one of the two cells ‘shimmers’ - meaning that the shimmer isn’t actually an all-encompassing medium because it’s hyper-specifically targeting individual cells? Or are we to understand that the shimmer emerges from a mutation in the cells, and not the other way around? Or do the cells divide because that’s what we are shown happening to Meyer’s (worm guy’s) gut cells earlier, and we’re to understand that Portman is also turning worm explosion - scientific accuracy be damned? Or is it clumsy foreshadowing of the iridescent clone at the end of the film? Also, keep in mind that all this stuff about dividing blood cells is being relayed by an unreliable narrator to an unreliable listener (that is to say that it’s unclear whose interpretation of Portman’s story this is - Lena’s or Lomax’s? (Did Lena tell Lomax about the multiple sex scenes, and the glass of water on her table?)). Also, there might be a demon sorcerer manipulating events. Also, maybe it’s all a dream sequence/hallucination... This is all admittedly complex, but it’s also undeniably loving moronic. And it’s not the only example of pointlesss ambiguity that detracts from the film: are the two videotapes edited diegetically or extra-diegetically? Is Ventress quoting Beckett intentionally or unintentionally? Does the formation of the torus require a human body and, if so, who went into the cave before Kane? As a more basic example of poor storytelling, take the character Josie, whose entire persona is summed up in a line of expository dialogue and a brief effects shot of vines growing through scars. She cuts herself, the dialogue says, to feel alive. “Recall the phenomenon of ‘cutters’ (mostly women who experience an irresistible urge to cut themselves with razors or otherwise hurt themselves), strictly correlative to the virtualization of our environs: it stands for a desperate strategy to return to the real of the body. As such, cutting is to be contrasted with the standard tattoo inscriptions on the body, which guarantee the subject's inclusion in the (virtual) symbolic order - with the cutters, the problem is the opposite one, namely the assertion of reality itself. Far from being suicidal, far from signalling a desire for self-annihilation, cutting is a radical attempt to (re)gain a stronghold in reality, or (another aspect of the same phenomenon) to firmly ground our ego in our bodily reality, against the unbearable anxiety of perceiving oneself as non-existing. The standard report of cutters is that, after seeing the red warm blood flowing out of the self-inflicted wound, they feel alive again, firmly rooted in reality. So, although, of course, cutting is a pathological phenomenon, it is nonetheless a pathological attempt at regaining some kind of normalcy, at avoiding a total psychotic breakdown.” -Zizek What Garland fails to convey is that Josie has stopped cutting. She no longer cuts. The scars have healed and, instead of “red, warm blood” flowing from her veins, we see the the veins themselves being replaced with special effects. The point is that the resumption of her cutting behaviour actually may have prevented her from ‘becoming a tree’. Even being charitable, Garland attempts to convey all of this in literally one shot. Likewise, one character drinks root beer and another has a dog keychain. These are the sole visualizations of their tragic backstories - which leads me to suspect that the whole boat exposition scene was added after test audiences didn’t know what the gently caress. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 09:36 on Mar 25, 2018 |
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Mar 25, 2018 09:34
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SMG spends too much time in too many threads writing a bunch of stuff no one reads. Annihilation was really good because it had the decency to get really weird with it. That last 30 minutes was spectacular to me.
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Mar 25, 2018 11:06
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I’ll admit that I wasn’t too sure about the two CG blobs that most of the final sequence revolved around. They seemed really primitive, like badly-rendered PS2 assets, and weren’t as visually interesting as the other weird Area X poo poo we’d seen up until that point.
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Mar 25, 2018 11:18
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Darth Walrus posted:I’ll admit that I wasn’t too sure about the two CG blobs that most of the final sequence revolved around. They seemed really primitive, like badly-rendered PS2 assets, and weren’t as visually interesting as the other weird Area X poo poo we’d seen up until that point. Zombie bear and crystal plants barely count as interesting or weird. It's sub-par video game poo poo.
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Mar 25, 2018 11:47
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PriorMarcus posted:Zombie bear and crystal plants barely count as interesting or weird. It's sub-par video game poo poo. Zombie bear was made more interesting by not being a zombie bear, but being a bear with a human skull embedded in its face. It was a cool little detail that really encapsulated the horror of what Area X does.
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Mar 25, 2018 12:10
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Darth Walrus posted:I’ll admit that I wasn’t too sure about the two CG blobs that most of the final sequence revolved around. They seemed really primitive, like badly-rendered PS2 assets, and weren’t as visually interesting as the other weird Area X poo poo we’d seen up until that point. The humanoid was a lady in a suit. She also plays the student who talks to Natalie Portman after class at the start of the movie.
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Mar 25, 2018 12:48
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business hammocks posted:The humanoid was a lady in a suit. She also plays the student who talks to Natalie Portman after class at the start of the movie. Yeah, I got that there was a person in a suit beneath it, but I thought they used CG for her in-film appearance. You know, like Gollum.
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Mar 25, 2018 12:54
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"50 posts overnight? I bet SMG has turned up...."precision posted:This Will Destroy You's song "Have You Passed Through This Night?" Burn!
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Mar 25, 2018 16:25
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Darth Walrus posted:Zombie bear was made more interesting by not being a zombie bear, but being a bear with a human skull embedded in its face. It was a cool little detail that really encapsulated the horror of what Area X does. And what’s that exactly? We’re given expository dialogue about merging consciousnesses and whatever, but this is never visualized - and the bear merely has the abilities of a parrot (or, to put a finer point on it, the creature from Predator). How can merely hearing a voice lead Josie to a theory of quantum brain-swapping though mere proximity? The most obvious conclusion is that Josie wrong, like she was wrong about the ‘hox genes’ thing (that’s not how they work) - and probably a lot else. The bear is really there because of Kane’s chest tattoo: a stylized grizzly bear that Lena surreptitiously strokes and fondles - the object cause of her desire. The bear is Kane’s ‘spirit animal’. That’s to say that, while the characters likely were attacked by an irradiated bear in a strictly plot-literal way, the psychological impact of the bear on them is due to Lena’s libidinal investment in the bear-image. (Plus Josie’s preoccupation with notions of disembodiment, and so-on.) Note that the vaguely human-skull-like protuberance is never clearly shown, and disappears when the bear is dead. This raises a point: why does Lomax interrogate Lena to find out about the bear, when he should have access to the massive bear carcass - on which he can perform all manner of tests. Is the interrogation mainly just a formality to accompany the huge loving mountain of evidence - or did the bear disintegrate, like the crystal trees did? Did everything disintegrate? The film cheats badly by eliding the aftermath. In the ‘Ville Perdu’ sequence, a massive, clearly decades-old, tree has grown up through the middle of a house - unambiguous evidence of the time-travel that is otherwise only spoken of in exposition. This tree could be read as an oblique reference to Barnstokkr, the tree from proto-Arthurian Norse myth (which happens to make a cameo appearance in Syberberg’s 1982 filmed version of Parsifal) - but it’s more specifically a surprising reference to Blair Witch 2: Book Of Shadows. In Blair Witch 2, which is specifically about the unreliability of eyewitness testimony, the witnesses report a massive tree growing through the center of a house. Subsequent investigation, however, reveals only a sapling. You could conclude that the Blair Witch teleported them through time with mystical quantum entanglement, but the truth is that the witnesses just misremembered and/or exaggerated the size of the tree. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 16:37 on Mar 25, 2018 |
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Mar 25, 2018 16:33
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Darth Walrus posted:Zombie bear was made more interesting by not being a zombie bear, but being a bear with a human skull embedded in its face. It was a cool little detail that really encapsulated the horror of what Area X does. The design was fine. It meandering around three vulnerable main characters for half an hour and even harmlessly giving one of them a good suck like she was a lolly pop was dumb. It feels like it walks around that room for ages before the person it's already failed to kill once shoots at it.
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Mar 25, 2018 16:42
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Darth Walrus posted:Yeah, I got that there was a person in a suit beneath it, but I thought they used CG for her in-film appearance. You know, like Gollum. I'm nearly positive it was a practical effect.
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Mar 25, 2018 16:43
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veni veni veni posted:I'm nearly positive it was a practical effect. Yeah, I think it was just a suit with some kind of iridescent coating.
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Mar 25, 2018 16:47
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PriorMarcus posted:The design was fine. It meandering around three vulnerable main characters for half an hour and even harmlessly giving one of them a good suck like she was a lolly pop was dumb. As others said, it’s collecting voices. It goes for the throat every time, and only attacks when they scream. I can’t help but wonder if it’s something like the investigative drive that led Kane’s squad to slice a friend’s belly open for science. Remember how one of them kisses him on the head to reassure him before they start cutting?
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Mar 25, 2018 16:48
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Interesting it only ever spoke with the one voice, then.
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Mar 25, 2018 16:53
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Sir Kodiak posted:Interesting it only ever spoke with the one voice, then. I mean, it did sound kind of choral. And its victim still had her skull, so that may have come from somewhere else.
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Mar 25, 2018 16:55
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PriorMarcus posted:The design was fine. It meandering around three vulnerable main characters for half an hour and even harmlessly giving one of them a good suck like she was a lolly pop was dumb. It seemed like it was feeding on panic, which is why it didn't attack when they were all sitting relatively still.
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Mar 25, 2018 16:55
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business hammocks posted:Yeah, I think it was just a suit with some kind of iridescent coating. Yeah. Unless I am wrong (I really can't find any info on it online but I was 100% convinced it was just a shiny suit by the end of the scene) so many people criticizing a practical effect as bad cgi is sort of a testament to it being well done, especially with what they were shooting for with that whole scene.
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Mar 25, 2018 17:02
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SMG is upset because it does not dream, and therefore cannot understand the basic premise of this film.
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Mar 25, 2018 19:03
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Magic Hate Ball posted:SMG is upset because it does not dream, and therefore cannot understand the basic premise of this film. That’s silly. Dreams are not incomprehensible. I have even given concrete explanations for the ‘dream-logic’ behind such as the talking cartoon bear and the flower people. Again, people ITT are unanimous in their assertion there is a hidden meaning of the film to be located ‘somewhere else’: in the book, in the (mis-)reading of Lovecraft as monkeycheese author, in the inaccessible inner depths of the simulated people, etc. Using ‘dream logic’ as a hand wave to prevent people from discussing the formal qualities of the movie is simple obscurantistism. And why is that your goal? To repeat: there is none of this sloppy storytelling in Matango, The Ruins, Alien Covenant, Jurassic Park: The Lost World, Chernobyl Diaries, Stalker, every Blair Witch movie, Abandoned Grain Elevator, Picnic At Hanging Rock, Monsters, Godzilla 2014, Area 407, etc.
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Mar 25, 2018 19:36
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