Annihilation

Annihilation was one of those movies that took me a long time to finish watching. I saw the very end of it at a movie theater once in February. I had it on DVD but didn't watch it until four weeks after I got it. When I finally watched the film I was in was awe. It was a great experience. 

Annihilation is a science fiction movie about a group of female scientists (led by Natalie Portman) who explore an alien environment called the Shimmer, which is slowly taking over more and more land over a big area.  Only one soldier came back from a ship but he in was in bad shape mentally and physically.

Once inside the shimmer, the scientists find themselves in quite a strange world, strangers in a strange land you could say. The film has some horror elements to it. First, they run into a mutated crocodile that nearly kills one of the crew. Portman opens the creatures' mouth and realizes its teeth were all different, mutated. She had first noticed these mutations on the plants. She spotted a plant that had endless variations all on the same vine. 

So what we come to know is that the Shimmer refracts DNA. The team sets up camp at the former soldier teams' base of operations. There's early signs of a mutiny early in the film. There's another monster attack (this movie has cool monsters and aliens). A giant bear strikes at the base just before dawn. It takes down a member of the crew. 

The crew gets distracted when Ventress (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh) says they should move on without trying to see if their crew-mate lived or was already dead. Lena (played by Portman lies to the team and says the best way to get back out is to go farther in by going to the water's shoreline, and taking the shoreline route all the way back. It was a ploy to get them to keep moving forward. 

At some point when everybody's asleep, a member of the crew commits a mutiny and ties everybody up in a chair. She has a knife to Lena's stomach. At this point we believe she might be going mad because of the effect of the shimmer. All of a sudden we hear the lost crew member's voice, yelling, shouting, the last words of her life screamed out into the open. It was a trick of the creature, the bear that attacked them. 

The bear tears the crazed woman's throat apart and that was the end of her. The others shoot down the creature as soon as they get themselves free. They keep moving forward. Another member of the crew says she doesn't want to go in, and becomes one with plants. 

Its just Ventress and Lena at this point. They make it to the Lighthouse, the goal for the team. Lena sees a camera that shows her husband killing himself with a phosphorous grenade, only to have a doppelganger walking in front of him. She runs down into this alien-like den, which reminded me of the Aliens' (from Prometheus) home planet lairs. 

Ventress is already mutating, into something...Its shown as a sort of violent exorcism, garish and video-gameish, Ventress puking out a blob of fantastic colours to loud sound. Overly dramatic but tends to get the point across. A splotch of blood from Lena's eye falls into the colourful blob, which triggers the blob into a humanoid form. 

The alien has no face or mouth, its just like a tall silver form, like an evil Silver Surfer. It chases Lena but it isn't clear what it wants. There's a bit of a struggle but in the end Lena throws a grenade at it, and it gets engulfed in flames, destroying the creature, the Lighthouse, and dissipating the Shimmer. 

Back at base Lena and her husband Kane are reunited. Kane admits he doesn't know he's the real Kane. And when he asks if Lena is human Lena does not respond. There's a shimmer in their eyes and that ends the film. 

What a story. I was quite taken a back with how gory and violent the film was at first. The part with Kane cutting open a guy's stomach with a knife made me cringe. The bear ripping throats was a surprise. Even the crocodile was somewhat unexpected. These horror elements add a lot of spice to what is otherwise a lot of dialogue with no action. This is a good amount of spice, its not overbearing. 
 
The special effects also had a strong effect on me. The ending was such an utterly climactic scene that I plan on re-watching it again. I've seen it twice now, once in the theater and most recently on my desktop computer. Seeing that in the movie theater was amazing, it was such a memorable science fiction scene. It reminded me of 2001 A Space Odyssey.  

On the other side, the monotone direction of the film is quite great, almost intellectual in a way. By making the movie more about the characters rather than action scenes they created a much better movie than most science fiction films. Its a smart science fiction movie like Arrival, another great sci-fi movie back from 2016. I feel that because the movie was sort of slow to build up, it actually created a much better and more climactic ending.

The science fiction element (DNA mutation) to the movie was what made it so cool to me. The alien at the end suggests an all powerful presence, but it isn't clear if it is, or if it even wants anything. The fact that the film ends with us not knowing if Kane and Lena are human or alien is what gives the film its edge. You could say that the movie was trying to go all intellectual on the audience. Or that they're just trying to be clever. But I would disagree. I would say they wanted to create an ending of all endings, infinite ideas to justify conclusion. Its quite interesting once you see it and think about it. Maybe even more interesting after watching it again...

You could throw down any number of theories for what happened (regarding if they are human or not) but ultimately the audience doesn't know. That is suspense!

Watch this movie, you won't regret it. 

Wind River

Wind River is a movie described as a neo-Western murder mystery film. The film stars Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olson as a US Fish and Wildlife Tracker (hunter) and an FBI agent who try to solve a murder on an Indian reservation. Director Taylor Sheridan wanted to create a film inspired by thousands of stories just like it, involving sexual assault of women on reservations. 

The movie starts off with Renner going to a reservation to hunt down some lions that are bothering this guy's livestock. He finds a woman's body in the wilderness with blood on her groin and he determines that she died from exposure, pulmonary hemorrhage caused by inhalation of sub-zero air. Obviously its a murder and the FBI is called in. On Indian reservations the FBI has jurisdiction over cases like this. Also, Renner knows who the girl is and is disturbed by the whole thing.

Elizabeth Olson comes on the scene but she's not prepared for what's to come. She didn't even bring a jacket. They start off by going to the girl's family. The mother is seen in her room cutting herself in the arm with a knife, a hearth-wrenching scene for sure. The father is annoyed by Olson who's asking her stupid questions. The father says his daughter was last at her boyfriend's house but he didn't know his name or whereabouts. But he suggests they go to see his son. 

So they go see his son and after a scuffle (gun firing, leading to a dead Indian man) his son tells Renner that the boyfriend works at a nearby oil drilling site. The oil drilling personnel are all sketchy and they say that they heard about Natlie's death via radio, Natalie being the girl that died. Olson mentions that her name was never mentioned on the radio. The Indian police officers with Olson start to put their guns up and the drilling personnel do the same but Olson calms everybody down and they go to the boyfriend's living quarters. 

Unfortunately when Olson opens the door she gets shot down hard and fast. A gunfight ensues and everyone except Olson and Renner (who's farther away with a sniper rifle) dies. Renner snipes all the drilling personnel and the guy in the living quarters runs away on foot. But he doesn't get very far. 

Renner captures him and takes him to the top of the mountain, where he forces him to confess his sins. He admits that he raped Natalie and that he killed Matt (the boyfriend) by beating him to death. This is a dark scene. Then Renner lets him free and tells him to run barefoot and see how far he gets. He mentions that Natalie made it six miles and that she was a warrior. 

The murderer runs a few yards before his legs give out and he spits up blood from his lungs. He dies. Renner then meets with the father, who is seen sitting outside in his "death face" paint. He admits that he made up the death face paint. Renner tells him that the killer went out with a whimper. They then sit together in silence, mourning. 

After that there's a message onscreen that says statistics are kept for every demographic except Native American women, whose numbers remain unknown. That to me was mind boggling. How can that be? What's wrong with government officials who can't even track something like that? Racism seems to be a big factor here.

The movie was very good and the characters were complex, especially Renner's character. The movie has a bold message about Indian reservation life and women, something that most people don't know anything about. For that reason the film is important. The harsh cold environment of the mountainous region of Wyoming gives the film a dark and cold gritty feel. It wouldn't be the same if it were on a reservation in California. 

Although the film is dark and the mystery element of it is given away in the end, (in a flashback scene of Natalie and the boyfriend in their room, disturbed by the murderer) I would say that the film isn't hurt by this reveal, instead it shows the audience the brutal nature these people were subjected to. 

Its a good film and did well in the box office and reviews. Check it out. 

Your Name 君の名は

So I saw a fantastic anime film the other night called Your Name. The film is arguably science fiction, romance, and deals with the fact that nothing lasts forever, which is very Japanese. You could say the film is science fiction because its about a boy and a girl who swap bodies through the mystic mystery of a shrine and the impending doom of a large crash landing comet. And the film is obviously a romance because although they don't realize it at first our boy and girl are star-crossed, and this is made even more evident when they finally meet, where instead of the boy writing his name on the girls' hand he instead writes I love you. The film was a huge commercial success and aired at Anime Expo 2016 (which I attended, but didn't see the film at), but only recently came out on DVD, made available through Netflix shipping.

The film is very slow-paced and mysterious at first. But once the film gets going about thirty minutes in you start to understand where the film is going and the fact that they are living in different time periods, although its only a small difference of three years. But its still so much of a time difference for them to have a hard time finding each other. There's religious elements because the girl lives with her grandmother and they take care of a shrine. The shrine is said to be ruled by a guardian spirit who rules human experiences and connections.

There's a comet that the boy finds out is going to destroy the girl's town and he tells her to evacuate the town. Once back in his own body and time he finds out most of the people survived the comet miraculously and he spots the girl with her soon to be husband in his Tokyo hometown. They chase each other down and ask,"Your name?"

The artwork in the film was very good too. There was some 3D shading effects and details, like when the comet came crashing down. Apparently the art work was all mostly done by one guy. Pretty impressive stuff. The anime art style of the characters is drawn in a modern way and there are some funny Japanese sort of mannerisms, like how every time they swap bodies the girl always touches her breasts, and likewise the guy always grabs down there. Pretty funny but not something that would happen in an American animated film made for the box office.

This is a film I would recommend to all anime fans because although the film is slow it has a lot of meaning in it. The idea of love, trying to find love, always having it within your grasp but then only to have it slip away once again. This is an idea we think about our entire lives even if we think we've found our true love, weather it be a person or vocation. For that reason I'd even be down to watch the movie again with a girl or even my friends who like anime but not so much the thoughtful sorts of anime like this.

Highly recommended!