I saw the movie Annihilation heavily referenced on Reddit for the creepy bear and other weird visuals in the film, and decided to check it out. Later, I learned that there was a bit of controversy over the casting re: Portman and Leigh playing characters that are WOC in the books and the author supposedly only having read book 1 so this being supposedly an accident. I'll get into that and the nonsense of this racial issue when I cover the books. The film's plot is an interesting enough sci-fi story and the visuals are mostly nice during still shots. The idea of an all female team is also interesting, but is effectively irrelevant to the film and the books, honestly, despite them leading in with "we're doing something different than before this time!! all women!" It's presented like it would lead to something, but it just doesn't. We have our cast of five women, with Portman never feeling like a real character. I've never liked her acting in, well, anything and she has never once in her entire career had any charisma with any man she's shared a screen with. Her husband in the film is next level no chemistry though, both before and after his "return". The husband himself is so dull of a character. I hated every second he was on screen. The man Portman is cheating with also has no chemistry with her, but is more tolerable on screen. If he had been cast as the husband and the dialogue made less cringey, the movie would be improved. The rest of the all women team outside of Portman don't get very much to do beside Leigh, who plays Ventress. Ventress is the only character that has any real presence on screen, so shout out to Leigh for carrying this film on her back. The other three women aren't too much to blame. They have little to work with and the narrative itself seems all too keen on casting them as nothing more than tropes. The two WOC actually in the film hilarious has some decent chemistry with Portman and with each other. Ventress does as well. You know, if you paired Portman off with any woman in this film, the relationship would be more believable and has far more spark. Maybe Portman should pull a Neve Campbell and start smooching women in films more. The visuals, as I mentioned earlier, are beautiful and interesting, when still. However, in motion, most of the CG looks pretty cheesy. That includes the bear everyone loves so much. It was wise to have the bear scenes at night because yeah, it's just not that great. Outside of the bear, a distorted corpse, and some interesting ungulates, there's really not anything fascinating within Area X. Ooh, flowers are growing all mixed together! Honestly, that's not that wild of a concept. You might find similar things in your own backyard. Not to quite that degree, but plants already get up to some freaky shit. I expected there would be more "terror" in this place, but aside from a mostly normal looking gator and the bear with the human skull (which I guess was just a regular bear at the start since the skull comes from a killed human), nothing really comes after them. Their bodies change on them, which is horrifying, but the body horror in this is pretty weak outside of the one incident that leads to the distorted corpse I already mentioned. Area X largely feels devoid of threats. The alien creature at the end doesn't feel like it meshes with anything earlier either and is very standard alien bullshit. It's so easily defeated it feels like the film had no idea how to end things and just quickly made up some bullshit on the spot. Visually beautiful, but narratively hollow. It works fine for the cancer metaphor overarching throughout the film as Portman essentially performing some kind of mimic of a cancer treatment on the "foreign body" to kill it. It just isn't satisfying. Worst parts of the film: the dialogue and the sex scenes. Holy shit are these the most dull, awful sex scenes I've seen in years. They interrupt the story so often too. Something serious, oh and here's a flashback to Portman having sex. And here she is having sex again. Some more sex. Her and her husband seem to have nothing connecting them but sex. It's the only thing the movie uses to tell us they "loved" each other. They literally have nothing in common. This is an already lengthy movie for no reason, and these sex scenes between two dull, uninteresting people with zero chemistry having the most bland ass sex imaginable waste such a significant portion of the run time I kept thinking to myself, goddamn, even sleazy B movies wouldn't waste this much of the movie on this crap! I'm not opposed to some fanservice or sex scenes in general, though I find Hollywood is generally bad at depicting anything resembling normal, good sex. But god was it egregious here. The rest of the cringe of the run time was the dialogue. Most of it is trash. I didn't feel bad when the first woman went down because she had a huge chunk of the dumber dialogue that didn't come from Portman or her bland ass husband. There's a lot of walking around in this too with nothing really happening. It doesn't feel suspenseful, it's not adding to intrigue. It's just dull. This movie would benefit from about 30-40 minutes shaved off of it, which could bring it to being a better, but still largely forgettable sci-fi film. I didn't entirely hate this film. I think what I hated is it had potential, some cool visuals, and in interesting premise but none of it really amounts to anything and the whole thing is heavily bogged down by shit writing and some really shit acting in places. The soundtrack is acceptable, but also forgettable. While Area X is visually stunning, it also feels generic. It doesn't "feel" like its own place. From my understanding, the books were partly inspired by Florida wilderness. But outside of the gator, Area X doesn't look Southern. Most of the time it feels like nowhere in particular, or somewhere Northern. I don't know why, but the film's scenery has a weird wintry coldness about it that I can't place, even though everything is in bloom. It just doesn't feel humid enough for where we're supposedly at. Something is just missing, and I say that as someone who has been to Florida many times and lived in the South all my life. And of course, that's because it wasn't filmed in the US Southeast. It was filmed in the United Kingdom. Maybe this could pass for the South for someone who has never been here, but I clocked it right away that it felt wrong. The film has quite a few other sins. Our biologist, Portman, is seen teaching a class that will be focusing on cancer for the semester. She's then brought in to study ecology for the team. This is fictional nonsense. I usually avoid mentioning my own information here, but my undergrad degree is actually in biology, the field of ecology specifically, though I have left the field and am in grad school right now in an entirely different field. While it makes sense someone studying biology would learn about a variety of topics over the course of their education, the actual professors are specialized people. Someone who would be able to do ecological field research wouldn't be who a university would have staffed to teach about cancer. This is absurdity. Reminds me of Friends with paleontology. The class is clearly just to set up the focus on Area X as a metaphor for cancer infecting the body and changing it against the person's control. The whole movie is focused on this idea. But they would have found a less dumb way to introduce this. It's a small eyeroll from me, but I am bringing this up because I'm going to bring it up again when I talk about the shitty books. There's also the tropey-ness mentioned earlier. "She's a recovered alcoholic, which means she's an addict, because once an addict always an addict" "she cut herself in the past so she's damaged forever" "my kid died so I am basically already dead because no one can have a healthy life again if their kid dies". So much disgusting, ableist crap. The last one is especially absurd when you look a human history and how we only recently have really cut down on kid deaths. I'm not saying that's not a traumatic experience. It is. But having a woman say she saying losing a kid means she can never be a whole person again and is basically already dead is some fucked up shit to put in a movie, because the movie doesn't examine this shit. It works from the idea that this woman is right about all of these people. For a team of all women, including one lesbian, so many conversations are just about dudes. It was kind of glaring when we're starting from "only women were chosen from this team", but the writing just can't shut up about dudes and flashing back to dudes. The women outside of Leigh and Portman have no development as gender never plays a role in anything, there's no reason for this all female team. Not that the movie needs to justify having all women on a team. I don't think that matters. It's that the film presents to the viewer at the start of the movie that this is of note for these expeditions. But ultimately, it is not. Now, the controversy. So, in the books, as I learned from reading reviews, Leigh and Portman's characters are WOC. However, the director claimed to only read the first book, where this is not mentioned. Counterpoint to that though is that the other two books were published well before the film would've been all that far in production and several things from book 2 and book 3 are in the film. So it seems absurd to say the director had absolutely no knowledge of the other two books. It's possible the author gave the director some information about it while working on the other two books, but even this seems silly. The books were all published pretty close to each other. They're not long books either. I ended up purchasing a copy to read for reviewing that contained all three books together and the sum total of all three books is less than 600 words. The average length of these books don't even hit 200 pages. They're short as fuck. He knew. However, I have my own counterpoint to that. It doesn't fucking matter. And I'll get into why as I dissect these god awful, used toiler paper quality books. Let's get this out of the way. Portman is portraying a character how is a white woman in the books. The most generous you can say is she is playing an extremely white passing mixed race woman who has a tiny bit of Asian in her. This is the book's own description of this "Asian" character:

"The biologist's hair had been long and dark brown, almost black, before they'd shaved it off. She had dark, thick eyebrows, green eyes, a slight, slightly off-center nose (broken once, falling on rocks), and high cheekbones that spoke to the strong Asian heritage on one side of her family."

Her Asian "features" only show up as "high cheekbones" (what). Nothing else. Not her eyes, not her hair, not her skintone, nothing. Later parts of the text describe her with other predominately European features. Her background described in book one is also very WASP-y coded. This Asian part feels added on for points and gives me "my ancestor is a Cherokee princess" vibes. (Which isn't the only time that happens in these books, including a dude talking about being 1/8th Indian. Anyway...) The high cheekbones shit killed me. Her most focused on feature is her green eyes in the book. This feels like "add a bit of of exoticness, but like NOT TOO FOREIGN" crap. This is a white woman. I've read people discuss that her experiences in the book and her otherness is about racism. Bullshit. Her otherness is portrayed as some edgy loner thing. But I really doubt that a mostly white woman with green eyes and mostly European features with a bit of Asian ancestry would be experiencing a shit ton of racism. I'm not sorry to say. Maybe it's the Biology degree talking, but you know when the more common, more dominant features of a race have long disappeared from someone's outward appearance, they usually ain't got much of that ancestry in them anymore. Like even with really light skinned Black people, you usually still see certain hair textures remaining when the melanin is going bye bye and other featureson the face are usually still there. The only thing we get for this Asian lady is "high cheekbones" (something actually common on pretty much all races) and being told there's a lot of Asian somewhere on one side of the family. I am going to make an even stronger stance against this woman having been written originally as an Asian woman. I don't think she was originally written as a woman at all. I think she was written as a white man and her husband a white woman, and the writer just flipped the pronouns at some point and did some mild rewriting to cover that up. In the first book, Annihilation, our Biologist reads like such a stereotypically manly man edgy loner dude you'd expect out of novel and cheap B movies written for 14 year old socially awkward boys to project on I cannot be convinced she was originally written as a woman. Her husband fulfills most of the same role and tropes of women typically paired with these kinds of dudes in fiction, a "healer" (through the body), gentle, mostly braindead for the story, whimsical and having nothing in common with the protagonist. Loads of sex. Dude's basically a manic pixie dream girl. Seeing this dynamic genderswapped has made me realize one thing though. Portraying this edgy type guy as a woman just makes it clear most of these male characters IRL would be double diagnosed with severe ASPD and severe BPD. They're basically glorified sociopaths with destructive abandonment issues. So, I work from the idea she was originally written as a man, then swapped to a woman. And some of her scenes outright would have been shredded to pieces had they been their original tropes. Because our biologist rapes her husband. Repeatedly. But it's just because she's so passionate, guys! (God, tht's literally already part of a trope...) She also beats him. Here, I'll leave you some quotes. When the Biologist's husband returns, he's amnesiatic. He doesn't know where he is, who she really is, or who he is. This happens the same night he returns, like almost immediately.

"After a time, I couldn't take it any longer. I took off his clothes, made him shower, then led him into the bedroom and made love to him with me on top. I was trying to reclaim remnants of the man I remembered, the one who, so unlike me, was outgoing and impetuous and always wanted to be of us. The man who had been a passionate recreational sailor, and for two weeks out of the year went with friends to the coast to go boating. I could find none of that in him now. The whole time he was inside me he looked up at my face with an expression that told me he did remember me but only through a kind of fog."

And right before he dies, the Biologist admits he never regained his memories and never really grasped who the hell she was. She continues to have loads of sex with him in this time frame. She seems to initiate all of it, while he mostly spends his days in a daze of doing really simplistic things like a child. It's so fucking creepy.

"I confess I went because I had hopes that there remained some spark of the man I'd once known. But I never really found it. Even the day I was told he had been diagnosed with inoperable, systemic cancer my husband stared at me with a slightly puzzled expression on his face."

If these roles were reversed, this would be obviously called out as creepy. Her husband comes back with no memories, never regains them, and never regains honestly full adult maturity. He's basically a blank slate with a child-like mind she's repeatedly having sex with. And yes, I do feel like he's portrayed as child-like. The dude after return is basically just sitting around doing very low mental effort tastes and never has any complex conversations with her. Even how she manages being around him shifts between basically parenting him and him being a sex partner. It's really fucking weird. As for the beating, before he leaves on his expedition, we get this jem.

"In those last weeks before the expedition, we had argued--violently. I had shoved him up against a wall, thrown things at him."

Charming. Again, flip the genders. This wouldn't fly. It shouldn't fly for a woman either. She had some weird ass confession from childhood too about making a boy strip for her entertainment after kissing him because "she didn't know any better". So she was being sexually inappropriate from an early age. We don't get into why. It's never explored, just another little fun tidbit about her. Other things about her is she hates when her husband says the word love. Because she's edgy like that. She has some on internal thoughts about how "society" says some of her behavior is antisocial and really selfish, but she doesn't think it is. Spoiler alert: she's definitely extremely anti-social. And I absolutely mean that in the medical context. Much of her past is her enjoying her research and then when her grants are coming close to an end, worrying about how people in the area she's in will perceive her as weird so she goes out in town to get blackout drunk and hop on every dude she can find then crashes her own research so her research projects all end in failure because she's worried she won't get more funding anyway so why not destroy it. And then she's definitely perceived as a that weird, trashy person who came to town. Like I said, this is some untreated BPD shit. Other dorky shit is she claims she never had dreams until she went to Area X. So special. The biologist has no friends outside of her husband's friends, and has no desire to be friends with anyone. Her husband also keeps pushing to find out more about her because he's convinced she's just hiding stuff about her real self and he's allured by finding out what she's really like (you'd think he'd get over this before the wedding, but whatever) because otherwise she's basically just an empty void. And she's like, yeah no, I'm really just an empty void that doesn't care about anything or anyone. She just does her science thing, which she also destroys, and does other destructive shit and cares about nothing. I've seen people online claim she has autism. This woman is a sociopath. She is not autistic. If the author intended to write autism, which I can't find any claims of, then he failed. This is a sociopath with BPD. She only seems to enjoy being with her husband when they're fucking, and they only have "interesting" (if you can call them that) conversations after sex. There's nothing else to them. Even the way the Biologist thinks about why she married her husband, because he is her opposite so should logically complete her faults, feels really mechanical. I never get the impression this woman actually loved anyone, not even the tidal pools she studied. But I'm not sure the author is intending this either. Also, just wanted to highlight this. I wrote in the margins "This may be the dumbest line I've ever read in my life." Behold, the orange juice.

"He drank deeply from his orange juice--really drank to savor it so that for a minute or two nothing existed in the house but his enjoyment."

Any time I've watched a sci-fi show or movie that made a big deal about oranges or orange juice, it has 100% of the time been the biggest red flag I was about to encounter some grade A bullshit. I have no idea why, but it's always the oranges. Her husband pre-leaving is also just weird. He's written so ~quirky~. The tropeyness of the movie is turned up to 11 in the book. Each character is reduced to their role in the role in the team, and the way these roles are written about, you get the impression the author thinks that someone is destined for a specific job from birth and only one mindset exists within those jobs. It's so B movie, in the worst way. So this element from the movie, like all the ridiculously ick sex, comes straight from the book. I kept writing in the margins "have you ever met a biologist?!" over and over at so many parts. Here's a few especially stupid bits.

"My lodestone, the place I always thought of when people asked me why I became a biologist, was the overgrown swimming pool in the backyard of the rented house where I grew up.

"A biologist is not a detective, but I began to think like a detective.

I think my soul left my body for a second at the last one. Our Biologist loves collecting data, she doesn't love analyzing it though. She's not here to sort out anything. Just catalog it. Yeah, that's what Biologists do, right? They just make logs of shit. And yes, she brings up several times that really is all she likes to do, just observe and record data. So stupid. The other members of the group as done similarly with stereotypes. I found it especially funny that the anthropologist was brought in to "bring in empathy" to the mission. LMAO. For anyone claiming this shit was analyzing colonization or racial issues, we have, canonly, a Native American woman bringing in an anthropologist to increase the empathy on the team. I can't. This kills me. The women are irrelevant though. We move on to book two with our now male protagonist, who is written pretty much identically to our Biologist who is now studying the returned Biologist. Much like hubbie, she comes back "different". And gradually morphs into a manic pixie dream girl. So, naturally, she becomes a love interest for the new male director who replaces the previous female one. It's literally the same stupid dynamic from the first book and continues over book two and three. It's so stupid. I hate it. This guy is called Control largely by the narrative. We'll go with that. His internal monologues read basically identical to the Biologist in book one, just a little less sociopathic. Furthering my point the author just wrote a dude and switched the pronouns. Because when he writes a male protagonist, it's the same shit again, but without the more abusive stuff. We still have a weird dynamic though, since he's literally holding her captive for book two. We get early signs he's into her because he can't stop staring at her boobs. Nothing about her as a person, just titties. Book two does introduce a lot of race stuff, in the early 2010s way of "I mentioned this person is not white!!" but never mentions when characters are white and the race largely doesn't really amount to much. Control is also POC, and mentions his dad experiencing racism, but unless I missed it, not himself. Sometimes races are brought up so weirdly it really does feel like someone was keeping a checklist. It never feels organic. Even when trying to bring up some racial issue, everything feels so disingenuous I can't take it seriously. And it rarely does this, anyway. I did not come away from reading this thinking it was any commentary on anything. It's just a really convoluted, bland, boring sci-fi trilogy. Not much actually happens in book two. Book one, despite the disturbed narrator, is the better written book and more interesting. It reminds me a lot of The Maze Runner. I thought that book was pretty good and felt like a good introduction to something that was going deeper. Read the rest and was like "wow, this is hot garbage" and tossed the books. The first book is as good as it gets. The second and third books meander on about nothing really. So much flashbacking to childhood whatever. For the first book it's a little forgivable because it feels like "well, maybe this is just how this character is", but when all the characters are like this, it's insufferable. Every character is basically written the same and does the same internal quirks with some slight variation. And I couldn't give a damn about any of them. There is not a single likable character in this entire trilogy. None. And what does it all lead up to? Anything interesting? Nope. The third books just kind of...ends. I was like, "that's it?" What a waste of time. For trilogy that doesn't even hit 600 pages, god is it a slog to get through. I read this over two sittings, book one and then book two and three. I could've finished it in a day, but book one was so garbage I didn't even want to get to book two. I also couldn't sort out the time period. Everything in it feels very late 90s, but I am pretty sure this is supposed to be in the future. Everyone is smoking, there's CDs and DVDs brought up several times, some of the gender role shit is very 80s-90s. Even the idea of not having an all female team until you've tried something over ten times seems...dated. The ideas around mental health and fat characters also feels from that era. So I was really confused to learn this is supposed to be a ways into the future. But IDK, things have gotten more regressive lately. Honestly, I found the whole book regressive and am surprised people were going on about the deep racially blah blah blah whatever that was missed in the movie. This book is not progressive. It came off like the few supposedly "progressive" elements were tacked on more as the story went on in a haphazard way like he was getting feedback from some readers to add that. It doesn't read as organic or well thought out. And I don't know why everyone was glazing this white dude as having done some serious commentary on racism. We're just left with a group accusing one white dude of not doing race issues as good as some other white dude who did it basically just a lazily. I am convinced the vast majority of the people who complained about Portman and Leigh's casting did not actually read these books. At the end of the day, the movie is a significantly better piece of media. The races stuff in the books contributed nothing to the characters or the plot, so who was a POC and who was not did not matter. The movie choosing some of the other team and other characters to be POC has the same amount of weight to it, narratively, as the books. All we're really losig is the pay rate, but even if Portman was one of the side characters instead, LBR, she was always going to get paid more than everyone because this is Hollywood. And I'm not gonna fault some guy for picking Portman to play an "Asian" character who is literally physically described as looking white outside of one feature that is common in all races. Same with Ventress and the Native American thing. It adds nothing, and makes some choices the Director makes later actually weirder with that knowledge in mind. Again, it feels like she was written as a white person, and then later some scenes were added to change that. Nothing interesting at all happens in the books. Oh, and I forgot the hyponosis. How could I? So, we have magical hypnosis in this. It makes people forget entire chunks of time on the fly. This isn't how hypnosis really works. The hypnosis in this is supernatural levels of power. The narrative even seems to suggest it's effectively that level of power. Who can do this supernatural super special hypnosis? The Native American, of course. But don't worry our pseudo-Asian woman is immune to this sorcery, because she's too smart and logic minded! Bruh. There's some off bits with Control as well in regards to Latino identity, but I'm honestly just tired of talking about these weird, dull characters. And there's no bear in the book. There's no interesting animals really at all. And I don't know how, but even the book feels really cold when it comes to the natural environment. Maybe it's because I've lived here a long time, maybe it's because I actually have the Biology "creds", but the way the scenery in Area X is described just doesn't feel Southern. It doesn't feel like someone who's trying hard to capture it. It's as generic as it is in the film. And that's my main thing. Everything that is bad in the film comes directly from the books. The parts that are better are the director's inventions. He improved what he could. He should've been even bolder in his alterations. There's at the base of this, the concept of something that could be interesting. It never is though, and the longer it went on, the less interesting it got. The movie was right to not add much past book one, though it very clearly contains things from book two and book three, regardless of what the director claims. There were some other issues with the books. Book one is largely in first person, with a few accidental dips into second. Accidental dips into second or first person happen frequently when the nook two switch to third person and again in book three that have first person and third person chapters bit sometimes has lines that are the wrong perspective as well. I noticed a lot of bad stylistic choices that really should've been caught by an editor. And the writing in general is just really cringe most of the time. It feels like no one came up to this guy with the amount of red this draft needed to get a more polished piece. So, here's my final ratings. I'm rating the trilogy all together as one and the movie as its own. Area X Trilogy Plot: 1/5 Interesting ideas that never go anywhere, relies heavily on tired old tropes, book two and three meander leading to nothing Characters: 1/5 Not a single likable or interesting character Writing: 1/5 Juvenile, pretentious, frequent grammatical and stylistic issues Scare Factor: 1/5 Dull as fuck Overall: 1/5 Toilet paper worthy text Annihilation Film Plot: 3/5 Interesting ideas but never goes deep with them Characters: 2/5 Walking tropes, bad acting, only Leigh has any strong presence Writing: 3/5 Lots of cringe dialogue and bad sex scenes, drags on too long, but metaphors work mostly well and some scenes work really well for worldbuilding Music: 3/5 Nothing interesting, but not bad, just there Cinematography+Effects: 4/5 Some shoddy CG in places, but also lots of really cool, ambient shots Scare Factor: 3/5 The bear legit did freak me out after watching the movie, and there's some creepy parts, but overall there's not much horror in this Overall: 3/5 Average sci-fi horror film, doesn't deliver on its premise but was worth a watch