Two science-fiction film: one filled with all the bells and whistles of special effects, but too confusing to enjoy; the other pleasantly lo-fi and surprisingly emotional.
Annihilation
Alex Garland's film Annihilation is based on the first book of Jeff VanderMeer's "Southern Reach" trilogy. I have not read VanderMeer's books but I intend to because I've heard nothing but praise for them. That said, the film Annihilation left me cold. Much like Garland's last film, Ex Machina, and Denis Villeneuve's Arrival, I *wanted* to like Annihilation more than I actually did.
A strength of Annihilation is it's nearly all-female cast. A team of female scientists and a paramedic head into "the shimmer"--a mysterious bubble that has emerged in Florida and has been growing larger and larger over a period of months and years. Lena (Natalie Portman), a biologist and soldier, has a strong motive for going headfirst into what might be a suicide mission: her husband, Kane (Oscar Isaac), was part of an expedition into the shimmer and he was the only one in his group to return. But Kane is not the same at all. Something happened inside that bubble, and Lena intends to find out what.
The group is led by Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), an emotionally opaque psychologist. The rest of the team includes Cass (Tuva Novotny), a geologist and surveyor, Josie (Tessa Thompson), a physicist, and Anya (Gina Rodriguez), a paramedic.
The fact that this film has an all-female team of scientists is what, for me, tips this film from C to C+ territory. That, and a few incredibly good/scary scenes.
But I found the film to be, overall, very confusing and just...*meh*. I didn't *care* about these characters enough to feel anything when most of them met an untimely fate. The final chunk of the film, which is supposed to explain what the fuck is going on in the shimmer was too weird and abstruse for me to understand. I came home and read the plot synopsis of the book to see if it might explain something I missed, but the plot of the book and the plot of the movie appear to be significantly different.
I felt unfulfilled by Annihilation. On the plus side, seeing it bumped VanderMeer's book to the top of my reading list. But I left the theatre with the feeling that I paid nearly 12 bucks (plus popcorn) to watch a movie that confused and annoyed me.
Grade: C+
***
Moon
Actor Sam Rockwell is having a year. He's up for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance as a racist and pretty dumb cop in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. But he has been acting for decades now and the real gold is his performance, playing opposite...himself!!?? in Duncan Jones modest and heartfelt film Moon.
Moon takes place in the not-too-distant future where earthlings have learned that they can harvest helium-3 from lunar soil to provide clean energy on earth. Rockwell plays Sam Bell, a man employed by Lunar Industries to maintain operations of the facility at Sarang Station, a lunar base. He has a three year contract which is almost up and he's excited because he'll get to see his wife and their 3 year old daughter very soon. He's also going a bit stir-crazy living by himself for three years with only Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey--gross, but also, Spacey has a good voice for this role), a robot that pretty much does everything from heal burn wounds to cut hair, for company.
But things go haywire when Sam gets into an accident while driving a harvester (a moon-tank, if you will) and then wakes up in the infirmary with no memory of the accident. Gerty tells him that central base is barring him from leaving the station until he is fully healed, but he convinces Gerty to let him outside to check on the outer shell of the station. Once out, he goes back to the accident site and finds a body. A body of a man that looks exactly like him.
He brings the man back and Gerty nurses the man back to health. Once the man is up, he confronts Sam. They're both Sam Bell--they look identical and have the same memories.
You don't want spoilers? Stop reading now...
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...yup, Sam and Sam are clones of the ORIGINAL Sam Bell (safely back on earth years ago). In order to save moolah, Lunar Industries only hired and paid one Sam and then made identical copies of the man and uploaded his memories to each one. So each Sam awakens thinking he's Sam Bell, with only three years to spend up on the moon until he can see his wife and child again. And when that time is up, the clone goes into a deep freeze and a new clone is awakened.
The problem, of course, is that the clones are not mindless robots. They're humans who need to eat and can get hurt and--importantly--feel emotions. When the two clones meet and figure out what is going on, they're kind of fucked because now they know that they will never leave the station and never see their loved ones again.
The film Moon was made at a relatively modest budget of $5 million and it shows--but it doesn't show *too much* if you know what I mean. Moon doesn't look cheap, it looks modest. And the special effects aren't the point. According to Wikipedia, Duncan Jones and his writing partner wrote this film specifically for Sam Rockwell, which is pretty cool, and Rockwell is fucking perfecto. He really sells the emotions of realizing he's just a cog in a machine, albeit a cog who feels love for a wife and child he remembers, but will never see.
Moon ends on a hopeful note, which I appreciated given the emotional investment that I put into the character of Sam. I really enjoyed Moon a lot and was surprised at how intensely it made me feel.
Grade: A-
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