Men (2022) - Movie Review

I love fucked-up movies. To me, there are few feelings I love more than when I’ve just finished watching a movie, and my first instinct is to scream “What the fuck did I just watch?!” while sporting a massive grin on my face. I’ve looked at quite a few films on this blog that have genuinely gotten that reaction out of me, like The Greasy Strangler, Malignant, Where The Dead Go To Die, and Titane, and the experiences I had watching them for the first time are memories I hold onto quite closely. But when the latest film by Alex Garland, whose last two films were certified sci-fi king hits, popped up in a cinema close(ish) to me, I can’t say I was expecting it to join that illustrious collection. But sure enough, here we are.

Annihilation (2018) - Movie Review

 

Watching Alex Garland’s evolution as a creative mind over the last two decades has proven quite fascinating, to the point where ‘evolution’ is the most apt way of describing his trajectory. Starting as a novelist, providing source material for one of Danny Boyle’s most underrated films with The Beach, he went on to collaborate with Boyle more directly, writing the scripts for some of his more widely-celebrated ventures like 28 Days Later. Then he set out to bring his own scripts to life with Ex Machina, one of the strongest sci-fi offerings of the last handful of years.

But this film, Annihilation, is the final test. He’s proven that he can write for multiple media forms, from novels to screenplays to video games, and he’s proven that he’s capable of visual storytelling on top of that. Now, it’s time to see if he can turn the work of someone else, in this case being Jeff VanderMeer’s novel of the same name, into a story that still carries his fingerprint.

Ex Machina (2015) - Movie Review

Once the fear response wears off, human inquisition starts about what exactly it is. Add to this our conflicting need for companionship, and it results in posing the big question: What counts as human? Speculative fiction owes about ¾ of its internal organs, and maybe 6 fingers, to this notion because it has resulted in some of its greatest work based on it. Take this notion about “what is human?” and give it to one Alex Garland, a man who might be one of the optimistic in terms of humanity as a species. Best known for his work with director Danny Boyle, and that kick-arse Dredd movie from a couple of years back, he has a thing for including characters, even villains, who are willing to help heal the world in the face of oblivion; It’s just that they went about in very different and morally opposing ways. Putting these two together has, apparently, lead to a highly acclaimed production that is being compared to seminal sci-fi works like 2001 and Solaris. As you can probably tell by my blog background, this sci-fi geek really hopes that its hype is justified.