The movie was visually very appealing. There are things I want to say about the audio that I can’t because I’d spoil things, but the music was cool and strange and somewhere between ominous and awesome (in the old sense of awesome), and the sounds, again I know many people care about spoilers and I placed no mark above warning so I’ll only say also super cool, sorry to be vague and cliche with my descriptors but getting too in-depth may lose me one of my three readers.

Anyway, the dialogue blew. The only purpose it seemed to serve besides exposition was to seemingly inflate the significance of the mystery of what was happening. I’m already confused and being gently pushed to accept that some things can’t be understood by humans so why continue to play it up? The characters, resting on impersonal dialogue, and plot mechanics that forbade significant relationship development, were pretty dull. It didn’t help that most of them were stewing in grief, either terrified of the surrounding phenomena or brooding over their trauma. Many of the characters seemed to dissolve into the plot’s background without strong motivations. Even the lead seems solely driven by the thought “what else is there for me to do?”

Copilot wants me to say that I was hoping for something more like Arrival, which is funny, because I thought I was watching Arrival until the dissonance between what I was certain it was about and what Annihilation seemed to be proving to be about dispossessed me of that notion. It’s almost worth a watch just for the visual/audio beauty, but Copilot wants me to recommend watching it on mute, which definitely defeats the purpose of enjoying the sound/track.