I'm honestly intrigued, but not enough to offset how disgusted and angry I still am over Men (2022). It'll be some time before I voluntarily sit through another movie with the name Alex Garland next to it.
I haven’t seen Men. Thanks for the warning. No sarcasm.
Yes, this was a tough one for me (to decide to post) because I loved the visuals, but the movie was a hard watch. Not because of any grossness, but the movie just had such an off feeling to it. Also, Natalie Portman’s character was sooo frustrating. Any question given to her was answered with such a slow vagueness. Ugh. The visuals though. The commercials didn’t really do any story related teasers, but focused on the visuals. That’s what put bodies in the seats.
You know how you can tell a movie is weird AF? After seeing this movie, I do. The end credits rolled and the audience just sort of sat there for like 10 seconds. When they got up, the discussion mostly consisted of, “What did that mean?” and “What was this about?” etc., even into the parking lot.
Oooh I just watched this for the first time last night, I loved it! That bear is damn near perfect monster design. The visuals are fantastic overall, I loved the fungal shapes & plants. I was kinda bugged that they seemed to imply swapping hox genes between species was causing it all though, like that's not how that works. Unless that was supposed to be a guess from the character...but she's supposed to be a biologist? Idk. I still liked the movie.
I took it as someone throwing out a wobbly attempt at a rational explanation to explain something that financially had no rational explanation. She was trying to find some logical stability, but didn’t even know where to start.
One of my favorite movies ever. This completely changed what I thought science fiction was capable of.
Highly recommend the book and its sequels, Authority and Acceptance, even if you’ve seen the film. They’re completely different, Alex Garland wrote the screenplay based on how he remembered the first book rather than its actual plot.
Oooh thank you for the rec! I didn't realize this was based on a book & it seems like the perfect scenario to expand on in a way only a novel can vs film.
Jeff VanderMeer’s books are strange. I just finished Borne and I’m kinda done with his writing style. It feels like an alien found a ‘How to write mystery novels’ book and wrote some itself.
I haven’t read anything past the Southern Reach books, but that was part of the charm for me. I can definitely see how it can get exhausting though. I don’t read as much as I’d like, and choosing that trilogy as my first books in several years was… one hell of a choice.
Also one of my favorite movies ever, it also has a killer soundtrack. I rewatch it every few years and every single time I have helplessly hoping on repeat for a few days after.
Huh. The books were about a really nasty form of fungus, according to Wikipedia.
That was not at all what I got from the movie. There was a meteor crash at the beginning even. I thought it was something like a von Neumann probe that wasn’t compatible with our particular brand of reality, an attempt by an alien entity to reach out and establish a connection with a world it didn’t understand. I loved the idea that all of the horrors were likely just incidental to the process of the entity attempting to learn in an inhuman fashion.
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