Alex Garland
Annientamento

A decent film, nothing particularly challenging or captivating. But the events surrounding its distribution speak volumes about the state of the Hollywood industry, serving as a perfect litmus test. A producer, in fact, expressed doubts about the film, finding it too slow, intellectual, with a too difficult ending and a protagonist not sympathetic enough. But the director and other producers opposed the requested changes, resulting in a stalemate that was "resolved" by releasing the film in theaters only in the United States, Canada, and China, while in the rest of the world, it went straight to Netflix.

This incident is significant in highlighting how devalued (not entirely unjustly, it must be said) the cinema audience has become. It's certainly not a trivial story that's presented, but I definitely struggle to see it as difficult and complex. The ending adds that enigmatic touch that can't help but please fans of "badass" cinema. Annihilation is not a blockbuster, it doesn't deserve too much attention, it's a sufficient sci-fi product that doesn't strive too hard to be cerebral and original. And many things are explained almost with captions. It is therefore even more surprising to hear about the distribution issues because it is certainly not an elitist work. But if we look at multiplex programming and the difficulty (or rather, the wait times) in finding slightly more challenging films in theaters, and remembering that supply is derived from demand, it becomes clear that distributors are simply giving the audience what it wants: coarse stuff.

The decadence is such that a little film like this is considered difficult, even intellectual. Better to pass the hot potato to Netflix, which doesn't really seem to care about the quality of its film selection. In fact, it often resembles a dumping ground where many cinematic wastes are collected. But Annihilation raises the bar a little, yes it does, at least compared to the dreadful Bright and perhaps even to Duncan Jones' Mute, which I abandoned after a few minutes.

Natalie Portman delivers a respectable performance, as do Jason Leigh and the others. The narrative structure has its merit, in terms of storytelling freshness, but perhaps it has fewer things to say than it would like to believe. What I criticize is the too action-oriented pacing (although slow), with little conceptual and cognitive intensity. In the concluding episode, at the lighthouse, it definitely picks up and leads to that open (but not so much) ending that didn't please those who funded it. Simply put, the darker and unexplained parts are the best of the film, which otherwise gets lost in fights with various monsters or disputes within the group of "strong women" (sic) on a mission in the prism.

Garland confirms himself as an interesting personality, although directing-wise, he's straightforward. But I fear that the insistence on the protagonist's human side and her relationship with her husband was more of a quantitative necessity, a filler, rather than a particularly sensible screenplay choice. Essentially: the vision of the "wonderful" doesn't even remotely match its theoretical framework. At the cinema (oops, on the couch) I don't want exhaustive explanations about mutating cells, I want to see the mutations. Perhaps in the next episodes, if they really make a trilogy.

6/10